With the rush towards cloud services, some business owners and IT leaders aren't looking at costs and cloud overages until after the fact. Plus, they may not know how to estimate near- or long-term costs -- causing wasted spending.
Amid those challenges, several companies are looking to help businesses manage their cloud spending, including ParkMyCloud. The company has already had a busy year expanding their services from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure and then Google Cloud Platform.
Now, ParkMyCloud is announcing further cost optimization platform enhancements for Microsoft Azure virtual machine scale sets and Google Cloud Platform managed instance groups.
The ParkMyCloud service allows customers to turn off instances that are not currently in use -- proactively eliminating wasteful spending on unused resources. The new inclusions of Azure scale sets and GCP managed instance groups are an important addition to the platform since they are frequently used for redundancy and scaling purposes.
For testing and development, a common practice is to set up a non-production network architecture that mirrors production. With these mirrored environments it can be easy for developers to leave the non-production environment running when not in use, which can end up costing the company considerable money for idle resources.
A range of companies now offer cloud cost management tools. Key players include Cloudyn, Cloudability, and RightScale, to name a few. It sounds like demand for such tools and services will continue to rise. In RightScale's State of the Cloud 2018 report, 58 percent of cloud users claim that optimizing cloud costs is their top initiative.