The cloud is no longer just a marketing buzzword. Instead, this information technology (IT) paradigm has become a necessity to stay afloat in today’s volatile, dynamic, and digital-driven business landscape. Through cloud-based platforms, companies of all sizes can easily gain access to vast amount of resources, quickly respond to opportunities, efficiently deploy a variety of applications, and scale at will to meet business needs and customer expectations.
While the business benefits of the cloud are clear, its on-demand nature often results in idle cloud resources and uncontrolled cloud costs. So how can organizations effectively manage cloud waste and optimize cloud spend? Enter ParkMyCloud.
As a trusted provider of its software as a service (SaaS) platform, ParkMyCloud offers the right approach to help companies quickly identify idle cloud resources and automatically turn them off when they’re not being used, thereby cutting costs.
SourceForge recently caught up with Jay Chapel, CEO of ParkMyCloud, to discuss idle cloud resources and cloud waste. Chapel also highlights the ways to help companies optimize and govern cloud usage and reduce cloud infrastructure costs.
Q: Can you share with us a brief background of ParkMyCloud? When was it established and what are the missions and goals that drive the company?
A: ParkMyCloud was founded in 2015. After spending 2 years in the cloud management space, we realized there was a need for a simple, single-purpose tool created expressly for the purpose of reducing cloud costs.
Jay Chapel, CEO of ParkMyCloud
Inspired by the success of “consumerized” business tools such as Dropbox and Evernote, ParkMyCloud is part of a fast-growing breed of simplified, purpose-built SaaS applications that were designed to solve one problem (cloud cost reduction), while providing the following benefits:
- Being extremely simple to implement and use;
- Taking just minutes to set up;
- Requiring no upfront costs or resources to integrate; and
- Providing rapid payback – often under two months.
By using ParkMyCloud, organizations can significantly reduce public cloud costs, based on how much is parked. For instance, food distribution giant Sysco is saving 40% on their Azure and AWS bills.
Q: Who are your current customers and/or clients? Or what types of businesses can greatly benefit from ParkMyCloud?
A: Any public cloud user can benefit from using ParkMyCloud. Our customers come from different verticals, ranging from software and financial services to consumer goods and everything in between. We also serve businesses of every size, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Some of our customers include McDonald’s, Sysco, Unilever, Avid, Fox, National Geographic, Dolby, Philips Respironics, Associated Press, and Sage Software.
Q: Cloud spending continues to rise as organizations look for ways to optimize their IT infrastructure. In fact, Gartner predicted that more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be, directly or indirectly, affected by the shift to cloud in the next five years. What do you think are the factors that drive the rapid growth of cloud services spending?
A: There are a few factors contributing to the rapid growth of cloud services spending. First, there are more companies using the cloud every year, and adopting a “cloud first” or “cloud only” strategy. Cloud is replacing a greater portion of traditional infrastructure each year. Second, within individual organizations, spend is on the rise. Some of this is attributable to natural growth and increased need. Another portion, however, is due to wasted spend – more on this below.
Q: We hear a lot about “idle cloud resources” these days. But what exactly does it mean and why is this becoming a huge problem for cloud users?
A: Typically when someone refers to an “idle cloud resource”, they mean a virtual machine, database, or other resources that are left running when it’s not being used. Because cloud resources are typically charged by the second, minute, or hour, that means that users end up paying for the time they’re not actually using.
Why are the resources left running? There are a few contributing factors. As users switch over from traditional infrastructure, there is a learning curve to get used to the time-based billing of the cloud, so they may not realize there’s a problem. Perhaps companies ask their cloud users to turn resources off, but end users forget. Or, developers may simply not care since the budget isn’t perceived as their problem. This is a huge financial burden on cloud customers. In fact, we estimated that up to $12.9 billion will be wasted on idle cloud resources in 2018.
Q: Aside from idle cloud resources, what other resources contribute to cloud waste?
A: There are a few other categories of cloud waste:
- Idle resources (as discussed above).
- Orphaned resources. Orphaned cloud resources such as snapshots and volumes occur when a virtual machine is terminated, but resources attached to that machine continue running and incurring costs.
- Overprovisioned resources. Whether it’s because they have selected the largest size by default or because needs have changed, users may be paying for resources in much larger sizes than they actually need. These resources need to be “rightsized” to match actual needs.
- Legacy resources. Cloud providers are always releasing new versions of their existing instance families, with the new versions almost always offered at a lower price.
- Many cloud users select “on demand” resources by default. However, cloud providers now offer a variety of purchasing options, such as Reserved Instances and Spot Instances, which can save a significant amount of money when used correctly.
Q: According to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud Report, “optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative for cloud users in 2018.” Can you share with our readers some general tips and/or advice on how to control cloud spend and minimize cloud waste?
A: Here’s where we would start. The first step is to take a good look at your cloud bill and see where your spend is going. This will help you find problem spots where you may need to terminate old resources, consolidate, and/or use a different resource type and/or purchasing option. Second, if you don’t already have governance measures in place, create them – the fewer people who have permissions to spend, the less room there is for error. Third, put measures in place to turn resources off when they’re not being used.
Q: As an expert in cloud management, how can ParkMyCloud optimize cloud spend? What tools, applications, or platforms does ParkMyCloud offer to identify and eliminate public cloud resource waste?
A: ParkMyCloud offers a SaaS platform that public cloud customers can use to automatically optimize spend. This solution looks at cloud usage in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud and recommends automated on/off schedules to turn resources off when they’re not typically used, which can save 65% of the cost of the resource. These can be applied using policies for fully automated cost optimization. We will soon be releasing “rightsizing” capabilities to allow users to optimize the size of their cloud infrastructure, with more optimization capabilities coming next year.
Q: How does ParkMyCloud cater to DevOps? What sets your software apart from other SaaS platforms?
A: Our DevOps users have told us that integrations with their existing tools are important to them, so we offer an open API, as well as integrations and bots to chat tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, so users can control their cloud resources with chat commands.
ParkMyCloud is also easy to set up, with no installations or downloads, so users don’t have to waste time out of their busy workdays.
Q: Where do you see the cloud computing industry going in the future? Are there any new focuses, strategies, market trends, and technologies on the rise in the cloud market? And how is ParkMyCloud meeting these head-on?
A: We see three key trends that will drive our company and platform vision over the next three years:
- Multi-cloud. It’s been long discussed, but it’s now a reality: 20% of the enterprises using our platform manage two or more CSPs in the platform, and that number is growing. As always, cost control is an important factor in a multi-cloud strategy.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS is growing, so users are looking to optimize these resources. ParkMyCloud offers optimization for databases, scale groups, and logical groups. We plan to expand into containers and stacks to meet this need.
- Data-driven automation (AIOps). Our customers, large and small, are pushing us to expand our data-driven policies and automation – everyone is becoming more comfortable with the idea of automation. Our first priority on this front is to optimize overprovisioned resources – often referred to as RightSizing.
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, Google Cloud, Azure, and Alibaba Cloud users such as McDonald’s, Sysco, Unilever, Fox, and Sage Software have used ParkMyCloud to cut their cloud spending by millions of dollars annually. ParkMyCloud helps companies like these optimize and govern cloud usage by integrating cost control into their DevOps processes.