It's the song our parents have been singing for as long as we can remember. If you aren't using it, turn it off. If you aren't playing with it, put it away. They wanted to make sure that electricity wasn't wasted, food wasn't wasted, and time wasn't wasted. In business, we all want the same thing as well. Owners and decision makers want to make sure that they use what they have paid for, and they don't want to pay more for resources that are not being used.
ParkMyCloud, an enterprise platform for continuous cost control in public cloud, recently extended its SmartParking for Google Cloud Platform. The cloud cost management platform already supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Now users of all three of the popular cloud platforms can create automatic, custom on/off schedules for cloud resources based actual usage metrics.
SmartParking: How it works
ParkMyCloud imports GCP metric data to look for usage patterns in the GCP virtual machine instances. With this utilization data, ParkMyCloud creates recommended schedules for each instance to turn off when they are typically idle, eliminating potential cloud waste, which could save companies money on their Google Cloud bill every month. Businesses can use the recommended schedules or continue to shut off VMs manually when needed. The company claims that using ParkMyCloud’s automated cost-saving technology, individual AWS and Azure customers have already saved over $1 million on their cloud bills.
SmartParking does not recommend “one-size-fits-all” solutions for businesses. The recommended schedules can be customized like an investment portfolio – choose between “conservative”, “balanced”, or “aggressive” based on business needs and preferences.
If a company wants to maximize their savings, choosing an aggressive approach to SmartParking will certainly grant savings, but will come with the risk of resources being unavailable when needed. Companies can override this by pausing the schedule to turn the resource back on. As expected, the conservative based schedule will only turn off resources when they absolutely would not be used, and balanced would be a good mix of aggressive and conservative.
ParkMyCloud plans to develop cost-savings measures for other services within each cloud provider and to expand to additional cloud providers over the next year.
