ParkMyCloud
Smart Automation to Minimize AWS Spend

Jay Chapel shares the secret sauce that makes Amazon Web Services a cloud market leader: “AWS has made it incredibly easy to consume their services by providing companies with low cost entry and agility, but these environments scale quickly.” The CEO and co-founder of ParkMyCloud says this leads to a grim reality. “AWS customers are often surprised by how quickly their monthly bills grow, and it soon becomes a major operational expense for them.” According to Chapel, more than half of the EC2 instances contributing to these exponentially growing costs are for non-production workloads such as development, test, QA and staging. What many people do not realize is that though these instances are often left running 24x7, they can actually be turned off outside of working hours. To companies with rising cloud bills, Dulles, VA based ParkMyCloud emerges as a silver bullet with its single-purpose SaaS platform that enables users to automatically schedule on/off times for these non-production environments in order to optimize costs. “ParkMyCloud enables businesses to discover, recommend, and ‘park’ (temporarily turn off) cloud services that are not in use, saving up to 65 percent per month,” states Chapel.

“Our product, ParkMyCloud, is a paradigm changer and defines the default state of these environments as OFF,” states Chapel. “It is like ‘Nest for the cloud.’” After creating ParkMyCloud account, users can instantaneously connect to AWS using their authentication process. “The application discovers EC2 instances and through its intuitive user interface, grants single-pane visibility into a company’s EC2 infrastructure across all AWS regions and permissioned accounts. This is something they don’t get from the AWS console,” states Chapel. Users can then schedule on/off times for their instances. Also, the users are immediately given recommendations of instances that are candidates for scheduling based on analytics. Users can see forecasted savings after they schedule the instances. “As they continue to park instances, they are also informed about month-to-date cost reduction,” says Chapel. Users have no need to worry if they need to use instances outside of normal working hours: they can snooze schedules to start instances on demand.

ParkMyCloud not only provides organizations with scheduling capability but also role-based access controls.

ParkMyCloud enables businesses to discover, recommend, and ‘park’ cloud services that are not in use, saving up to 65 percent per month

This governance model allows clients to create teams and define role-based policies. “ParkMyCloud helps small and large enterprises to automate cost optimization,” says Chapel. The holistic approach of ParkMyCloud in addressing a gamut of instance issues has been a crucial factor in creating numerous success stories. As one example, Tristar Medical Group—a health service provider in Australia—sought a solution to constrain expenditure on operating AWS EC2 instances while maintaining continuity of its services. After deploying ParkMyCloud, Tristar could schedule their servers and migrate existing data center instances to AWS in an economical manner.

“We create success stories akin to Tristar Medical Group because we focus on providing our customers a cutting-edge solution that ensures cost-optimization,” says Chapel. “We analyze the customer feedback, identify pain points, and add value to existing processes by continually enhancing our product.” Since its launch, ParkMyCloud has experienced rapid adoption by customers across industries and geographies. “It is also increasingly being used by customers as a simple proxy to the AWS console. And we have added the ability for customers to park auto-scaling groups, create and manage logical groups, and leverage our API for DevOps integration. We intend to continue to innovate and add more functionality, helping customers save more but not just on AWS and compute,” says Chapel. “To this end, we will soon release support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and add the ability to optimize and manage database services and storage,” he concludes.