To save on billing costs, you can stop your General Purpose managed instance when you're not using it. Stopping an instance is similar to deallocating a virtual machine. When an instance is in a stopped state, you're no longer billed for compute and licensing costs but still billed for data and backup storage.

Stopping a managed instance clears all cached data.

After the stop operation is initiated, it typically takes about 5 minutes to stop the instance. However, starting an instance takes about 20 minutes from the moment the start operation is initiated. Only managed instances in a ready state can be stopped. After the instance is stopped, it stays in a stopped state until a start operation is initiated, either manually or triggered with a defined schedule. Only instances that are in a stopped state can be started.