Because the workload follows apredictable business-hours schedule, the lowest-overhead solution is to usescheduled scalingwith EC2 Auto Scaling. AWS documentation states that scheduled actions let you scale an Auto Scaling group at specific times or on recurring schedules by changing desired, minimum, and maximum capacity. That directly matches a workload that needs instances during business hours and not at night. Manual start and stop actions add operational work, Spot Instances risk interruptions during business hours, and sizing for maximum load with Reserved Instances would overpay for idle time. Scheduled scaling automates the exact time-based pattern the question describes.

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