ParkMyCloud
Optimize Cloud Computing Costs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today holds the majority of the public cloud market as it has made consuming their services incredibly easy, allowing companies to quickly scale their environments. In fact, EC2- AWS’s server business-accounts for 70 percent of Amazon’s 10 Bn dollars run rate business in 2016 and has grown from 7.88 Bn dollars in 2015. While the speed and ease of operations is attractive, AWS customers are often shocked by how fast their monthly bills grow. The AWS bill becomes a major operational expense, attracting internal scrutiny from Operations and Finance.

“A significant portion of these huge bills are for instances that are not even in use. About half of AWS EC2 instances support non-production workloads, such as development, testing, staging, and QA, and typically can be turned off at night and on weekends when developers go home. Yet most companies leave them running 24X7,” says Jay Chapel, CEO and Co-founder of ParkMyCloud. “We offer a simple SaaS application that helps AWS customers – including global companies such as Avid, Sage, and Neustar— save time and money by scheduling on/off times for their non-production environments. It’s like ‘Nest for the Cloud’.” This is done without custom scripting and without DevOps expertise.

As an AWS customer and AWS Advanced Technology Partner, ParkMyCloud employs the use of IaaS solutions, such as Elastic Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups, and S3 object storage; “we also use PaaS services RDS and ElastiCache,” adds Chapel. “These solutions help ParkMyCloud maintain scalability, availability, and performance for our customers.”

ParkMyCloud’s focus is on controlling costs for non-production EC2 environments. Their role is twofold; helping AWS customers stretch their budgets further by not wasting money on idle EC2 instances; and to help their partner, AWS, over subscribe their infrastructure. ParkMyCloud is simple to use. All the user needs to do is create an account, connect to AWS using their AWS credentials, and ParkMyCloud discovers the client’s EC2 environments.

We offer a simple SaaS application that helps AWS customers save time and money by scheduling on/ off times for their non-production environments

“Users are given a complete view of their EC2 infrastructure, across all their AWS accounts and regions. This is something they don’t get from the AWS console,” explains Chapel. “Users are also immediately given recommendations of instances that are candidates to schedule on/off times based on analytics. To park those systems, users create a schedule using a simple interface, which they can then attach to one or more instances.” As the users continue to park instances, the company shows them how much they have actually saved month-to-date and a running 30-day savings projection.

Recently, ParkMyCloud helped Avid, an audio and video technology solution provider, to reduce their annual AWS spending by 55,000 dollars. Avid recently migrated their enterprise environment into AWS, and needed to ensure their teams would not leave non-production running 24x7, eating away at the budget hour by hour. ParkMyCloud assisted Avid with schedules attached to each of their non-production instances to turn off nights and weekends. As a global organization, they currently use multiple schedules to ensure that instances are “on” only when staff needs them.

From the outset, ParkMyCloud has been adopted across industries, verticals, and geographies. With customers increasingly using their user interface as a simple proxy to the AWS console, ParkMyCloud intends to leverage that to continue innovating and adding more features, helping customers save more of their EC2 costs. “We will focus on saving customers money in other AWS services, and add other cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google Compute,” concludes Chapel.