Ready to Stop Paying for Cloud Resources You Aren’t Using?

Customers have the ability to set up and schedule tasks for Cloudability to programmatically perform on their behalf. This automation capability is typically used to perform cleanup/hygiene tasks (Unattached EBS), cost savings tasks (stop and start EC2, RDS, or ASGs) and governance tasks (EBS snapshot management.)

The cloud provides an elastic on-demand infrastructure to meet the requirements of development teams. Typical stages that are involved in the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline of an application are development, test and production. While the production environment needs to meet the high requirements of SLAs, development and test are generally non-critical and only used during working hours.

In fact, data from AWS shows that leveraging the benefits of cloud cost optimization during these unused hours can deliver a potential 75% savings (40 working hours vs. 178 hours).This is where Cloudability can help optimize your cloud costs.

By leveraging our Automation capabilities, you can efficiently scale down or stop resources during those periods of underutilization. With automation, you can also detect and remove waste and ensure that all teams are applying the same best practices across your organization to take full advantage of the elastic, on-demand capabilities of the cloud while continuously controlling costs.

Automation Best Practices

Perform regular hygiene and cleanup of unallocated resources

Often unattached EBS volumes, old EBS snapshots and dozens more types of unused or unnoticed resources can result in the business paying more for cloud resources than necessary. For example, a well-known North American insurance company leverages the Automation capabilities in Cloudability to clean up unattached EBS volumes. This ensures that any EBS-related waste throughout their large engineering organization is cleaned up promptly instead of wasting their technology budget on unnecessary resources.

Automate shutdown and restart of resources for cost savings

Developing and maintaining internal tools to help automate the shutdown and restart of resources, or to clean up waste, can be time consuming. It can also be difficult to scale and manage, especially at the rapid pace in which the cloud providers are innovating. A great example is AWS, who has grown from offering 1 service at its inception in 2006 to now offering over 140 services in 2018.

Cloudability works with a global commerce company that uses our Automation capability to stop and start development team EC2 instances when they aren’t being used, saving money that can be reallocated to more critical production resources.

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Creating a new task for stopping and starting EC2 instances.

Enable governance to help manage cost within teams

By getting easy-to-use tools in the hands of development teams and their leaders, organizations can easily create and maintain a culture of cost optimization. This ensures that the cloud budget is allocated to the most critical resources across your entire infrastructure.

Once you’ve scheduled tasks in Cloudability, you can review the Audit Log for each task to see the number of resources affected by that run.

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A sample Cloudability Automation audit log.

Get Started

Automation is available to Cloudability customers using AWS. To get access to Automation and start using it today, submit a request to Cloudability Support to turn it on for your user account. Once you’ve been granted access (Automation is an Admin-only capability), you’ll want to check out our instructions on how to set up Automation.

To learn more about Automation, check out:

  • Automation overview
  • Setting up tasks
  • Reading the audit log

If you’re not currently a Cloudability user and would like to learn more about Automation, sign up for your free trial.

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