devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: ParkMyCloud

  • ParkMyCloud Adds Rightsizing to Enable Enterprises to Better Optimize Cloud Costs

    Cloud cost optimization leader adds new method to address cloud waste to improve cloud users’ efficiency

    November 21, 2018 (Dulles, VA) – ParkMyCloud, provider of the leading enterprise platform for continuous cost control in public cloud, announced today that its cost optimization platform has now expanded to provide “rightsizing”. Rightsizing is a way to reduce wasted cloud spend by resizing cloud resources, and can provide significant savings: just by moving a virtual machine down one size tier, 50% or more  — and resources are often so overprovisioned that multiple size transitions are possible, raising that savings to 75% or more.

    This joins ParkMyCloud’s “parking” functionality, which automatically schedules non-production cloud resources, such as those used for development, testing, staging, and QA, to turn off when they’re not needed. With a typical schedule that parks a resource for 12 hours each night and on weekends, users can save 65% of the cost of their resources. Combined with rightsizing, this means that an average cloud user is poised to reduce overall costs in their cloud environment from 50-80% or more.

    This release marks the first step to a fully automated instance “SmartSizing”, which ParkMyCloud will release in January 2019. SmartSizing will take rightsizing a step further by actually automating size corrections, requiring little management on the part of the user.

    “With each release of the ParkMyCloud platform, we’re delivering customers another piece of the puzzle they need to fully automate multi-cloud cost optimization,” said Bill Supernor, ParkMyCloud’s Chief Technology Officer. “We developed rightsizing in close contact with customers based on their needs, and initial feedback has been positive.”

    ParkMyCloud will demo the new functionality at AWS re:Invent, November 26th through November 29th, and invites attendees to visit the company in the expo hall at  booth #1709.

    About ParkMyCloud

    ParkMyCloud provides an easy-to-use platform that helps enterprises automatically identify and eliminate wasted cloud spend. More than 800 enterprises around the world – including Unilever, Sysco, Hitachi ID Systems, Papa John’s, and National Geographic – trust ParkMyCloud to cut their cloud spend by millions of dollars annually. ParkMyCloud’s SaaS offering allows enterprises to easily manage, govern, and optimize their spend across multiple public clouds. For more information, visit www.parkmycloud.com.

  • ParkMyCloud Announces Scale Group Parking for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform

    Leading Cloud Cost Optimization Platform Expands Savings on Public Cloud Resources

    June 1, 2018 (Dulles, VA) – ParkMyCloud, the leading enterprise platform for continuous cost control in public cloud, announced today that it has released cost optimization support for Microsoft Azure virtual machine scale sets and Google Cloud Platform managed instance groups.

    The ParkMyCloud platform helps Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers save money on cloud resources by automatically integrating cost control into their DevOps processes. ParkMyCloud saves money by scheduling cloud resources to turn off when they are not needed – which they call “parking”.

    Azure scale sets and GCP managed instance groups are groups of cloud resources that are frequently used for redundancy and scaling purposes. For testing and development, common practice is to set up a non-production network architecture that mirrors production. All too often, the non-production environment is left running, wasting money on resources that aren’t being used. With ParkMyCloud cost control in place, users can automate “off” or “scaled down” schedules for these resources, ensuring that they only pay for services they are actually using.

    “Customers using scale groups in public cloud are typically savvy users who are increasingly cost conscious,” said Bill Supernor, ParkMyCloud CTO. “With each release, we are expanding ParkMyCloud’s automation engine to support the cloud resources our customers are using.  This allows them to easily incorporate cost optimization with their DevOps process.”

    Earlier this year, ParkMyCloud released automated usage-based cost optimization called “SmartParking” for AWS, Azure and GCP. In the coming months, ParkMyCloud plans to release support for Alibaba Cloud as well as additional resource types  in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

    About ParkMyCloud

    ParkMyCloud is a SaaS platform that automatically identifies and eliminates public cloud resource waste, reducing spending by 65% or more — think “Nest for the cloud.” AWS, Azure and Google users such as McDonald’s, Sysco Foods, Unilever, Avid, and Sage Software have used ParkMyCloud to cut their cloud spending by millions of dollars. ParkMyCloud helps companies like these optimize and govern cloud usage by integrating cost control into their DevOps processes. For more information, visit https://www.parkmycloud.com.

     

    Contact

    Katy Stalcup

    kstalcup@parkmycloud.com

    (571) 334-3291

  • DevOps Pro Tips on Cloud Management

    DevOps Pro Tips on Cloud Management

    In this DevOps Chat we are joined by Andy Richman of Park My Cloud and Samir Mehra of Cloud Health Technologies. Both of these cloud experts give sound advice on how you can best and most efficiently manage your cloud infrastructure, whether it is on AWS, Azure, Google or anywhere else. If you are interested in optimizing your cloud deployments and cloud management in general (who isn’t?), then have a listen.

    As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation so you can read along. Enjoy!

    BTW, we have recorded two other podcasts with Park My Cloud. You can listen to them here and here.

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another episode of DevOps Chat. We’ve got a great chat lined up today. We’re gonna be talking a little bit about managing your cloud infrastructure, cost, and how much do you really know about or how much insight do you really have into your cloud infrastructure.

    We’ve got two great guests lined up to join us and help us today. First, I have Andy Richman. Andy is with ParkMyCloud, and Andy, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Andy Richman: Thank you, Alan. Looking forward to this.

    Shimel: Okay, and you know what, Andy, before we introduce Samir, why don’t we just, for anyone who may not be familiar with ParkMyCloud, why don’t you give us a little background on what your role is there?

    Richman: Sure. So, I’m the Product Manager over here at ParkMyCloud, and I think about all things automation and saving money in the cloud. The way we describe it is cost optimization. We launched the company in September, 2015, so we’ve been around just over a couple of years now, and we work with all manner of companies, from large Fortune 500 type companies, right, all the way through to smaller startups born in the cloud, and we’re helping all of those people effectively manage their infrastructure and get the most bang for the buck out of it.

    Shimel: Excellent. Okay, we’ll come back to you in a second, Andy, but first let us introduce Samir Mehra—and I messed that up Samir, I apologize. Why don’t you correct me?

    Samir Mehra: It’s Samir Mehra.

    Shimel: Oh, I wasn’t too bad, then. And Samir, why don’t you tell us your company and background

    Mehra: Yeah, so I’m Director of Product Management here at CloudHealth Technologies. CloudHealth Technologies is a SaaS platform that provides visibility into all your cloud environments, so customers can really look at areas for optimization, and this can include cost, usage, configuration, security, and performance. And then we also have ways that you can automatically remediate some of these optimizations with our policy engine.

    Shimel: Got it. So, Andy, Samir—not to boil it down to dollars and cents, but let’s boil it down to dollars and cents. Is cost sort of the biggest factor in what companies are looking at in terms of managing their cloud infrastructure? I mean, you guys do similar but different tasks for organizations using cloud. What’s your opinion? Is cost the number one priority there? Andy, let’s go with you first.

    Richman: Sure. So, it depend where you are in terms of your company’s cloud evolution. So, if you’re moving from an on prem data center type operation into the cloud, then no, it probably isn’t. You’re thinking about migration, getting workloads moved over, you know, getting performance in the cloud.

    Once you’re in the cloud, you know, obviously, you’re looking to optimize the performance, you know, you’re probably looking to scale up what you’re doing there. And again, cost is moving up, but it probably isn’t number one or number two. But once you’ve been in the cloud for a couple of years and, you know, month on month, you’ve seen those cloud bills climbing, then typically, yeah, it begins to get a lot of attention. And, for most of the companies we’re working with, they’re all at different stages, but probably the majority are pretty focused, and it probably is in that top three, top five for the company.

    Shimel: Excellent. Samir, how about you?

    Mehra: So, I look at it in a different way. It depends on what type of company you are. If you’re a born in the cloud company, you know about how cloud is supposed to be managed. I think cost is not the important thing, it’s the efficiency with which you want to execute things and how quickly you want to get up with your production infrastructure or your test dev infrastructure. And really, I think those companies are very apt at managing some of their costs and making sure their cost is optimized, because they only have been dealing with opex.

    But, when it comes to enterprise companies, I feel some of them, even though they’ve migrated a bunch to the cloud, they still think of cloud as something which is capex. They generally overprovision when they don’t need to overprovision. You know, cost is secondary for them, too, but they have so much of extra spend in what you call cloud sprawl that they really need somebody to help them visualize it and give them ways to optimize that cost.

    Shimel: Yep. So, you know, I always like to say that the costs are almost symptomatic of something else, though, right? Especially when we talk about things like cloud, guys. You know, the costs are relatively set. You can look up on a price chart and see, you know, what a gigabit of storage is, how much CPU time costs or what have you.

    I think when we talk about the cost of cloud and stuff like that, really, the underlying thing is a question of control. Do we really have insight into what we’re using and how we’re using it, right? And, because we don’t, it translates into a cost we may not understand or expect or even know what the heck’s going on. But really, the underlying issue is control and more management of what this is.

    And both of your organizations kind of play a role in that. Why don’t you—and not to create a knock-down, drag out, but can you give me a contrast, Samir, let’s say, in what your company does versus what Andy and the folks over at ParkMyCloud do?

    Mehra: So, I’ll start with the fact that, you know, from what we’ve seen our customers spend, IAS and virtual machines or EC2 instances are really still the biggest spend. People haven’t really transitioned into a lot of TAS services, though TAS services definitely are picking up.

    The way we do it is, you know, to help prevent cloud sprawl, we do have a policy engine where you can set up a policy which tells you if there’s an instances that is started that is more expensive than what you want an individual to set up. So, if they go spin up a really huge instances, you can get alerted, you can actually set up a policy which turns that instance down, even before it gets to run. And the other thing is, you know, the way we prevent sprawl also is, we give you—we, again, use a policy engine and tell you, “You know what? There’s somebody who spun up an instance,” and they have them tag those instances. So, there’s no way to know who’s actually spun that instance up, and if you don’t know who spun that up, you can actually now go and ask them, “Why did you spin it up, and what’s the purpose of this instance?” if it is an expensive instance that they’ve spun up.

    So, we definitely rely on our policy engine a lot, on making sure we have these governance policies implemented to help prevent cloud sprawl from the beginning.

    Shimel: Excellent. Andy, your take on it?

    Richman: Yeah, sure, so we do have a slightly different viewpoint on this. So, when that cloud bill drops in at the end of the month, typically about 70 percent of it is being spent on compute, just as Samir said. If you actually look within that compute, what you’ll quickly discover is, about half of it is for production systems—these are things that typically need to run 24/7—but the other half is your dev, test, QA, data analytics type environments. And there’s at least the potential to turn those instances off when they’re not being used, and we’re really focused on that half of the infrastructure.

    So, what we do is, we give DevOps, IT Ops, you know, engineers an easier way to get those instances turned off. So, in a week, there’s 168 hours, so if you didn’t know, that’s about 730 hours in a month. And even if your team’s working 60 hours a week, which is a pretty hard working team, it still means you can save 65 percent by just turning things off when they’re not being used.

    And so, what we’ve really focused on is the automation piece of this. So, to ensure that when things aren’t being used and there’s no value being added, they’re just simply turned off. And we have semi-similar kind of policy engines that automate this, but an ability, effectively, to create a simple schedule, have it applied across your various different teams, and throwing off some pretty significant savings pretty quickly.

    Shimel: Got it. So, automation is something that, in DevOps, we understand very well, right? It’s key to what a lot of what DevOps is about. And so, the idea of turning down, shutting off, closing up unused instances, unused resources—I mean, just, it’s a no-brainer, you would think, right?

    But why do you think more people or more organizations aren’t doing that kind of thing? Andy, why don’t you go first, if you’d like?

    Richman: Oh, sure. I mean, some of them are doing it, and they’re writing on scripts, but they tend not to do it in a particularly systematic manner. And when you actually talk to the people—I spend quite a lot of time talking to our customers—a lot of it is because, you know, they don’t want to take away control from the teams who are out there, you know, delivering code, delivering value to the company. And often, they just don’t have the insights in terms of how those various instances, VMs are being utilized. And it really requires buy-in from the teams themselves.

    And so, what we’ve seen in the companies that are doing this well is that they create a lot of buy-in. The thing that people quickly realize is that oftentimes it’s not just about stripping costs out and spending them elsewhere in the enterprise, this is just about efficiency, and that money often will get recycled back into other R&D projects, you know, other things that people wanna be doing.

    So, I think the more progressive organizations get it. I think what they’re able to do with a tool like ours is to do it in a scalable way. So, you’ve got multiple teams, lots of individuals, lots of different workloads. We give them a way to do that very, very quickly, simply. It adds a couple of minutes of work to their week and they can kinda schedule it in place and reap the benefits.

    The other thing that’s awesome is visibility. This may be something that Samir can talk about a bit more. It’s, once you begin to give back the DevOps teams, you know, the actual visibility on the savings they’re getting, it becomes a kind of a, somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy or a kinda closed loop. They see the savings they’re getting, they do more of it; they see more savings, they do more of it—that kind of positive affirmation.

    Mehra: Yeah, actually, we—sorry, go ahead, Alan.

    Shimel: No, no. I was gonna say, Samir, what about you? [Laughter] I’m sorry.

    Mehra: No, that’s fine. So, we’ve seen, we use our product, our DevOps engineers within CloudHealth also use CloudHealth to manage the AWS environment that we have for production for our SaaS environment. And our DevOps engineer is definitely not a financial person, but like Andy said, when he sees those cost savings, his eyes do light up. He’s like, “I can really save this much money if I actually right size some of these instances that are being underutilized.” And he does, he’ll do, over the weekends, or when we can, do a right size of some of our instances to drop our costs down.

    So, we actually use our platform ourselves to do it, and our DevOp engineers are using it. And we do have plenty of customers doing similar things, and it’s not just right sizing a particular instance. You can also, you know, look at it from an automatic scaling group perspective. You know, you want to right size the automatic scaling group or the next automatic scaling group that you spin up. You want it to be right sized because you’re gonna have a cost savings associated with it.

    Richman: One of the things, Alan, that’s interesting is that people would often quote you the cost of their infrastructure or say, “This is an instance that’s 25 cents now, or 50 cents now” or something like that. What they haven’t done is the mental math—well, okay, what is that gonna mean in a month? And so, a 50 cents an hour instance is actually $365.00 a month. And if you can save 50, 60 percent of that, it’s a significant amount of money, particularly for customers who have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of instances.

    Mehra: Yeah, I completely agree. I think once you multiply the one instance which costs 50 cents into 100 and 200, that’s where you actually see the huge amount of cost savings that you can have.

    Shimel: Excellent. Good. Guys, as I think I mentioned to you when we got on here, time goes really quick, and we only have time for another question or two here, and I want to focus in on a couple of things. Obviously, looking at both of your company services is a great way to get started along this, getting a handle on what you have in the cloud. But if you had to give, let’s say, a top three things that our listeners should do, beyond just signing up—signing up with your company is obvious. But top three things together between the two of you—what would they be?

    Richman: Samir, do you want to go first, or…

    Mehra: Yeah, I would say, make sure you have visibility into your spend so that you can make sure that you’re not spending where you don’t need to spend.

    Shimel: Excellent.

    Mehra: So, cost visibility, for sure.

    Shimel: Andy, how about you?

    Richman: Yeah, so for us, it’s really—you know, focus where the largest amount of potential savings are. And, based on our experience, that’s in your non-production workloads. So, when we focus on that and then start to look, you know, talk to your QA team, talk to your development team, talk to people running analytics workloads, and really understand, you know, how many hours a week those instances truly need to be running. I mean, even if you’re conservative and you only turn things off in the really small hours of the night, the savings really quickly mount up. And then, to really start to do it systematically, kinda team by team and rolling it across, rather than just more of an ad hoc kind of effort.

    Mehra: Yeah, and I can add a third one along with that is, you can also do it on your production infrastructure, and there’s two ways to really do it. One is, you know, right size your production infrastructure and you can do it during a down time where you can right size during a down time, but also look at reservations, because reservations is a huge cost saver compared to running on demand.

    Richman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we have recently added to the platform and we’re gonna be adding a lot more in the next couple of months is bringing in the utilization data. So, you know, looking at your CPU, your network, your disk usage and really using that to drive these changes.

    We’ve recently introduced these kind of simple heat maps where people can come in, look at the platform, and see the hours when their instances are actually being used. Rather than just asking people when they’re using, you know, what’s being used when, you can actually see the actual usage and, post-Christmas, we’re gonna be moving into the right sizing space in a similar way using similar kinds of metrics.

    So, there’s definitely a lot of tools out there that can help you do this in a more informed way.

    Shimel: Yep. Agreed. Well, guys, we’re just about out of time, here. Samir, Andy—thanks so much for being our guests on this episode of DevOps Chat. You know what I didn’t realize—Andy, for people who want to get more information on ParkMyCloud, is it ParkMyCloud.com?

    Richman: Yep, that would be ParkMyCloud.com.

    Shimel: Yep, and Samir, URL for your company?

    Mehra: Yeah, it’s www.CloudHealthTech.com.

    Shimel: So, that’s Cloud Health Deck, D-E-C-K.

    Mehra: T-E-C-H.

    Shimel: Okay. Got it. Alright, T-E-C-H. We’ll put it in the show notes as well, in case anyone is not clear.

    Andy, Samir, thanks for being our guests. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we’ll see you on another DevOps Chat very soon, everyone. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Chat: ParkMyCloud Saves Wolfpack App Over 50 Percent on Cloud

    DevOps Chat: ParkMyCloud Saves Wolfpack App Over 50 Percent on Cloud

    In this DevOps Chat, find out how the developers of Wolfpack (wolfpack.run) are saving over 50 percent in cloud costs by using ParkMyCloud’s cloud management platform.

    Though the cloud offers many benefits to app developers and others, controlling the costs can sometimes elude organizations big and small. Cloud sprawl can quickly lead to large cloud bills. In this chat, we speak with Jonathan Chashper, CEO of Wolfpack, about how his company got a handle on the cloud and is spending less than 50 percent of what it was paying before.

    As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Audio

    Transcript

    [su_pullquote align=”right”] [su_custom_gallery source=”media: 118815″ target=”blank” width=”200″ height=”200″]Chris Parlette
    Chris Parlette is the Director of Cloud Solutions at ParkMyCloud. Chris helps customers reduce their cloud waste and manage their hybrid infrastructures by drawing on his years of experience working at various software startups. From SaaS to on-prem, virtualization to cloud, monitoring tools to cloud management platforms, and small businesses to large enterprises, Chris has seen it all and loves helping drive improvements to IT management.[/su_pullquote]

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we’re here for another DevOps Chat. Today’s chat is actually a great behind-the-scenes look at ParkMyCloud and how an app provider named WolfPack is using Park My Cloud to really kinda get a handle on their cloud costs, their cloud usage and optimizing the cloud for their applications.

    That being said, let me introduce you to our guest for today’s podcast. Our first guest is the CEO and founder of WolfPack, and his name is Jonathan Chashper. Jonathan, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Jonathan Chashper: Thank you, Alan. Thank you for having me.

    Shimel: Thank you. And then our second guest is from ParkMyCloud, it’s Chris Parlette, and Chris, I hope I don’t mess up the title, but it’s director of Cloud Solutions?

    Chris Parlette: Correct, yes. And thanks, Alan, for having us—appreciate being here.

    Shimel: Not a problem. So, guys, this is gonna be a fun one, I think. Jonathan, why don’t you give our audience a little background—what exactly is this WolfPack app?

    Chashper: Sure. So, WolfPack, we are—you can look at us as a connected vehicle technology focusing specifically on helping individuals move together. Think about how much fun it is to move as a group. Imagine you are, you know, maybe several families moving in a few cars. It’s a lot of fun, but there are two major problems—one, keeping everybody together, making sure people don’t get separated, don’t get lost. And the second one is actually communicating with each other while traveling and doing it safely.

    Now imagine you are now doing it on model cycles, which is the first niche we’re focusing on. So, we’re solving those two problems with WolfPack, and by the way, people can take a look at WolfPack.run-R-U-N-to see how it works. But generally, what we do is, we provide, with a turn-by-turn navigation, to every one of the people driving or riding, while providing a radar showing the location of everybody else.

    So, we actually make sure that everybody gets there without being killed, without being lost, without getting into a ditch, and making the experience much less stressful, and much more fun.

    Shimel: And that’s a good thing. But Jonathan, well, you know, WolfPack represents sort of this new—it’s not really new. I’ve seen them now for a couple years, but I call them these instant group type of applications where you can create a group on the fly and that group can have two people or 200 people or more, right? And this group then does something. In the case of WolfPack, you know, they’re on a run or a trip of some sort, and you have Google Maps built into it or underlying it and, you know, all of these things, and they’re great.

    The problem is, as you probably are well aware, is you never know from moment to moment, you know, what your load is gonna be, right? How many groups, how big a group, you know, what’s going on?

    And so, in resource planning, that can be a problem. Talk to me—

    Chashper: Correct.

    Shimel: —yep. Talk to us a little bit about what you’re doing with ParkMyCloud and how that’s helping you.

    Chashper: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so you’re absolutely correct. What you said at the beginning, it’s true. We can—our users can immediately generate groups, it can be, they can generate any number of groups. It can generate—any group can have any number of people. They can plan a ride which can be as short as 10 miles or as long as 1,000 miles, so you’re absolutely right.

    And so, when we’re building the system, obviously, it’s a cloud based system. We are on top of AWS. What’s important for us is that the development costs, being a startup, is being-you know, kept to the minimum. And so, what we did, we actually looked into ParkMyCloud, and with ParkMyCloud, we got to the point that we control our development costs very, very tightly. Generally speaking, when you’re using a server in the cloud, as long as you don’t turn it off, it still works and you’re still being billed for it. And if your development teams go home-say, they work 9 to 7 every day, they go home at 7. If the servers are off, you’re still paying for them.

    So, what we did with ParkMyCloud, we actually manage the up time of those servers, so we only pay for the time we’re actually using those servers for our development for our staging.

    The other good thing we’re having is that we actually have quite good visibility. True—a nice supporting feature, which I think is pretty new, where we can see very, very quickly, you know, when is our load high, what is actually being used, what is not being used, if anything needs to shut down. So, we can manage that very, very easily. And specifically, on the park management, it’s almost a file and forget. Once you set it up once, you never need to go back to it, and it just does it for you.

    Shimel: Got it. So, Jonathan, let me just be clear, I want to make sure we’re talking apples to apples. So, when you say, you know, you’re not using the server overnight or something like that, are you saying that, with ParkMyCloud, you can schedule your instances to close? So, in other words, I’m only gonna use this instance from 9 to 5, and at 5:00, retire that instance, close it out, don’t keep it on my billing account, and when I start up again tomorrow at 9, I’ll start a new instance with that same configuration and kind of pick up where I left off, or is it something else?

    Chashper: So, first, we need to understand that you can use ParkMyCloud on your non-production instances. Production instances obviously need to be up 24/7, so you don’t want to shut them down.

    Shimel: Yeah, you’re right—I should have said that. [Laughter] No one wants to shut down their production.

    Chashper: Yes. So, what I was referring to, I was talking about our development and staging nonproduction systems.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Chashper: Yeah, so that’s for that.

    Shimel: But are you actually—I guess what I’m asking, are you retiring those instances and firing up new ones the next day, or is it—

    Chashper: Oh, this is—yeah, so this is done automatically for us. That’s the beautiful thing about ParkMyCloud. We actually, once you set up the parking schedule, it will shut down the server, say, 5 p.m. today, and it will turn it on back tomorrow morning, say, 9 a.m. We don’t need to do anything. This is done for us automatically, and so you know, where the developers come back into the office, as far as they’re concerned, nothing changed, they just keep working.

    Shimel: That’s fantastic. Chris, I just want to confirm with you—those instances are actually, you know, it’s sort of like immutable infrastructure, right? Those instances are retired, done, and then re-fired up the next day?

    Parlette: Yeah, so what this is—and it’s not terminating the instances, it’s actually just stopping them and then turning the same ones back on. And the nice thing is about that, is that now, you know, as people are working on these servers, you know, if you haven’t fully gone with data, you know, not being stored on those servers, you know, as you’re working on these same servers over and over and over again, you know, we stop them and then start them right back up again. So, even if people like your finance department or your QA department maybe have some things, you know, spun up, we can actually turn them off to save on the CPU and memory costs, and then we just turn them back on again.

    Shimel: I got it. Okay, because I was gonna say, you know, I mean, the immutable infrastructure angle is great, but in this sort of circumstance, it’s not just a configuration of the server, it was the state of the data that you were working on, and how the heck would you re-create that every morning? [Laughter] But that explains it—got it.

    So, Jonathan, you know, so ParkMyCloud is making you guys a lot more efficient here in the cloud and your use of cloud resources. Have you been able to quantify a percentage savings or anything like that?

    Chashper: Oh, absolutely—most definitely. If I want to be, you know, conservative, I would probably say that we’re saving around 55 [percent]to 60 percent.

    Shimel: Really?

    Chashper: At least. Frankly, I think we probably save close to 70 percent. We’re really very tight. We really manage to do that in a very tight manner.

    Shimel: So, beyond just closing down and firing up the instances the next day, what are some of the other things you’re doing with ParkMyCloud?

    Chashper: Oh, so—well, for us, the first thing is reporting and notification. If something happens, we get notified, we can actually control what we get to be notified about. So, then we’ll get notification about maybe a server that needs to be shut down or something like that.

    Reporting is very important to us so you can see your usage, you can see what is up and what is down.

    Shimel: Got it.

    Chashper: One of the cool things we just started using is actually a mobile app. So, there is a mobile app on iOS for ParkMyCloud. People can download it at the iOS store. And it actually happened with me, I was at dinner, and we—my guys had to stay a little later, and we had to, what we call, snooze one of the parking, you know, schedules, and I just did that through the mobile app, I didn’t even have to go online.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Very cool. So, guys—look, 50 percent or better savings, all these other benefits is certainly nothing to sneeze at. I think anyone would jump at it.

    But, Chris, let’s dive in with you now a little bit, if we can. You know, we have an audience here of DevOps sort of folks from all over the world, right, who would love to save 50 percent on their cloud bill. How is ParkMyCloud working with these DevOps engineers and DevOps teams to realize those kinds of savings and efficiencies.

    Parlette: Sure, yeah. So, we work, you know, plug into a lot of DevOps processes and toolkits straightaway. I mean, that’s something that we do internally, and then, you know, we certainly have all of our customers, from large enterprises down to small startups, all doing this same kind of thing.

    And so, there’s a few different ways to do that. One of the big things about DevOps is automation, and so, we have a full policy engine so you can set up the policies to look at tags, to look at locations to different regions that these servers were in, naming schemes—all these different kind of factors, and you can automatically apply schedules and assign to teams and decide on different actions to take based on these policies for any new instances that you spun up. So, that’s one automated way.

    We also have a full API, so you could plug into DevOps tools like Atlassian, Bamboo or Jenkins so that these tools can kind of reach into our API, temporarily override schedules, change schedules—all this as a part of an automated thing.

    One of the other things about, you know, DevOps—not just automation, but also just thinking whole business, kind of a holistic approach to this thing—and so, we also have a full, a very easy to use UI. So, if your users are, maybe are a little less technical or you don’t want them to necessarily have direct access to a database console or Azure or Google consoles, this can kind of be sort of a proxy for that console so that other users can come in and manage their end servers. They don’t have to ask IT to turn things on for them. They can kinda manage their own servers and do all this, but you can decide who has access to what through this approach.

    So, there’s a couple different ways we plug into these teams and these processes so that users can get their best bang for their buck.

    Shimel: Got it, got it, got it. Now, so, Chris, when you talk about plugging into things like Bamboo or Jenkins, what you’re really—I mean, I just wanna make sure I’m clear. You can build sort of the ParkMyCloud—not sort of, but you can build the ParkMyCloud policies right into your CI/CD pipeline. Is that what you’re saying?

    Parlette: Yes, so if you do things like using tags, especially as instances are spun up or spun down, a lot of people say, you know, “Hey, I put a million tags on every instance.” And so, that’s what the ParkMyCloud policies can read off those tags and kinda decide on the actions based on those tags.

    And then, as far as things like—you know, specifically, if we were to talk about Jenkins or some other build processes, you know, you can have these environments built out and shut down. And then Jenkins, at the beginning of some sort of build process, can call into ParkMyCloud and say, “Hey, I need these servers up, and so I wanna override these schedules.” Spin ’em up, the servers are up, it does all it needs to do, and at the end, it just either shuts them down or, if you don’t shut them down, then basically, if you only did an override, let’s say, for two hours? At the end of the two hours, we’ll revert back to our original schedule, so that way you don’t have to remember to turn the lights out when you leave the room, right? So, we actually can shut things down for you.

    Shimel: Excellent. And Chris, give me an idea of—so, when you guys are engaged, I mean, with that kind of API, with that kind of integration into the DevOps toolset, you’re probably getting a decent view of how DevOps teams are using ParkMyCloud. And you’ve given us some examples, here.

    Are there any—I guess what I’m trying to ask, are there any special things that the DevOps people are doing that perhaps waterfall or other types of technologies are not doing? Is there commonality? Is it very easy to say, “Oh, these guys must be doing DevOps, because here’s, you know, what they’re doing?” Have you noticed any of that?

    Parlette: Yeah.

    Chashper: Alan, before Chris answers, maybe I can jump in and give a quick lead-in to this.

    Parlette: Sure.

    Chashper: Sorry, Chris—hope you don’t mind.

    Parlette: Sure.

    Chashper: Actually, one of the things I wanted to say is that we don’t have DevOps people at all, and one of the reasons we’re using ParkMyCloud is because we’re actually—we’re not DevOps people. We don’t know what needs to be done. We don’t speak, you know, Chef or any one of those guys.

    So—but the fact that we could actually use ParkMyCloud and then the user interface they provided us with, the web client, at least it did for us, went away, and everything is handled at that level. So, for us, that was a big, big move forward.

    Shimel: Yeah, no—and that actually is a great point, Jonathan. And Chris, I’m sorry we hijacked you here for a second.

    Parlette: No problem.

    Shimel: But the problem is, in today’s market, frankly, hiring people who have Chef or Puppet or Jenkins or, you know, DevOps skills sets is (a) hard to find, and (b) very expensive, right? And so, if you can deliver benefits like 50 percent savings on cloud usage or allowing some automation like this, it certainly is a lot easier. I don’t know of any engineering team that wouldn’t like that.

    But, you know, Chris, what do you see? I mean, are most of the people using the UI, or are they just you know, kinda going to APIs and stuff like that?

    Parlette: Yeah, and you know, as we get into larger customers, you know, it definitely is a mix of the UI and the API. The other change that we see, the mindset shift that we see from people is, especially as they’re moving from on-prem to cloud, a lot of people, when they’re used to—a lot of people, when they’re coming from a [Dog barks].

    Shimel: Hey, Jonathan, I think Chris might have shut off there for a second. Chris, you there?

    Parlette: Here we go. I’m back—I’m back. So, one of the things that, you know, as people are moving from on-prem to cloud, you get a lot of people who are used to leaving things on 24/7, because you know, on-prem, as things are left—you know, if you spin things up, it’s not an additional cost, really, to leave them on 24/7.

    And so, in this shift to the cloud, they have this shift of mindset where, if they’re being charged by the hour or it’s something that, you know, every hour that it’s left on is additional cost.

    Chashper: Yeah.

    Parlette: And so, when people are used to leaving things on 24/7, now the shift we have with people using ParkMyCloud, especially in an automated way, is to leave things off 24/7 and then kind of spin them up on demand. And so, that’s really where I think, you know, Jonathan and his team use that a lot, where things can be off, you know, turn on a schedule, but also just turn on on demand so, as the users have access to the UI and the API, they can turn things on on demand, as opposed to having to turn things off on demand.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Well, guys, you know, as I told you off mic, the time here goes really quick. [Laughter] We’ve already been on 18 minutes, beyond the 15 minutes I told you we would do, so we’re gonna need to wrap this one up right here. But first of all, Jonathan Chashper, CEO, Founder of WolfPack, it’s WolfPack.run is the URL, correct?

    Chashper: Yes, absolutely—thank you.

    Shimel: Thank you. Thank you for sharing with us today and giving us a little peek behind the kimono of how you guys are using ParkMyCloud. Continued success for any of our motorcycle riding friends or any group out there who—you know, I encourage you to check WolfPack out, it’s a pretty cool app.

    And Chris, thanks so much for sharing a little bit more, you know, a little behind-the-scenes look and a little bit more of a peek at, you know, ParkMyCloud and how it’s helping companies. Thanks for being on today’s DevOps Chat.

    Parlette: Yeah, Alan. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

    Chashper: Alan—thank you very, very much. It was a pleasure.

    Shimel: Thank you, guys. You know what? We’re recording this right before Thanksgiving—have a happy holiday. Happy holidays to everyone listening! You’re probably listening to this after Thanksgiving, but it’s the start of the holiday season, so happy holidays, everyone.

    This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. Hope to see you soon on another chat, and have a great day.

    — Alan Shimel