You should probably do it with a workflow

after I posted this I started poking around and looks like workflow would be the best course for doing what I need.

thanks

Those instances are EC2 instances, right? Why not leverage VSA backup? That way the powerstate becomes irrelevant and you can continue creating backups without a need for a worklow or script. 

We do use VSA for a few of our bigger EC2’s - but have decided due to cost to stick with the old file system backup strategy with fewer VSA’s. 

What kind of cost are you talking about if I may ask? Do you keep the DEV backups for a long time? What are protecting now with the agent as I assume you are protecting the entire VM because you most likely do not have context with the stuff that they are doing. You already have access nodes in place so in case of a streaming backup it's just a matter of some processing cost and some cost for storage for the unique blocks. Being able to deliver back a broken dev box to a developer might be a big win as well as this will also save cost ;-) 

mainly the additional proxies we would need is what is driving the cost. About 25 + more would be needed for our footprint. For prod, we have infinite retention which in turn eats our budget so we have to do everything else as cost effective as possible.  

So it's a big environment, right? How many VM's are in scope and again what's te retention? In case you want to keep them for a short period of time, say 7 days, then you could consider using snapshots alone. That would also result in cost, but as snapshots re incremental combined with a short retention it might be something to consider. 

B.t.w. are you leveraging the scale-out capabilities of Commvault? 

Oh, and b.t.w. about the way to automate it yourself. I would stay away from workloads and just create some script leveraging the APIs to handle this. It seems you have a lot of dev guys around so plenty of help in the neighborhood ;-)