New tool uses S3 to reap AWS cost savings

A new company has emerged from stealth an alternative to AWS Auto Scaling Groups for SMEs looking for tips to reduce costs EC2.

A new company of the flesh of nowhere in the vast ecosystem of Amazon Web Services, this week, with software that "parks" AWS EC2 cloud computing resources to reduce costs.

. ParkMyCloud Inc., based in Sterling, Virginia, meat With this software stealth REST API to record images using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - in which there are at calculating hourly fees. He throws these cases from EC2 images when needed most. The company also claims performance overhead is negligible to turn the machine back, because the software works out of band and case are simply decree "not stored as snapshots. Upon restart, the cases are relit, assign an IP address and they are ready for operation.

The tool evaluates the cost savings users also get ahead of the monthly billing, with the price, rocking a beta client to invest in the tool instead of making your own script to get the same result.

"Month after month, was continued by the bill, and more customers will use [our services], also has accounts," said Michael Biddick, CEO of Fusion PPT, a business technology services Washington, DC that specializes in the creation of development and test environments in the cloud. "But honestly, I do not know if we were going to see the savings in it, or what would be the savings."

In retrospect, the fact that the company handles workloads test and development, which does not require machines running 24/7, which has been designed especially suitable for ParkMyCloud method to generate cost savings. ParkMyCloud Fusion PPT The software uses the first month, the AWS were 55% cost saving thousands of dollars in savings, BY Biddick.

"We have had a return on investment in the first two weeks of using the software," Biddick Said.

Scripts ParkMyCloud could do this, but for a small company, the developer would take time to write the scripts would be more expensive than the use of the software. ParkMyCloud starts at $ 29 per month for up to 29 cases, and the price levels to $ 99 for 29-99 EC2 instances, and reaches a maximum of $ 499 per month to 500 cases.

Hyphens also not provide cost savings. "Just be a surprise at the end of the month we have recovered," Biddick Said.

From the management perspective, the scripts do not necessarily visible from the point of view of the reporting and governance, and auto-discover new and additional resources in different regions, Biddick said.

The ParkMyCloud tool has limits; CEO Jay Chapelle said the focus of the company is starting and small and medium enterprises. You are asked to customers in more than 500 cases of ParkMyCloud call for price and service.

Also the company is very young, a spin-off of the Ostrato majority, making a platform for cloud management software. ITS has received initial funding ParkMyCloud July 1.

Young as the company it has more sweetener deal on the table. ParkMyCloud add role-based access, branding, naming conventions, a recommendation engine that shows the servers to park, and usage reports last connection control.

Also ParkMyCloud scale against specific groups Auto Amazon, which are free to all AWS users; users can set a minimum setting of "zero" in Auto Scaling Groups and achieve the same effect as ParkMyCloud offers.

Said ParkMyCloud chapel sees society as Auto Scaling groups mainly behind offering high availability load balancers and develop massively for retailers on vacation, instead of being a tool of simple cost reduction.

"The main goal of both is very different." Chapel said Auto Scaling Groups, said that "the goal is the performance for the cost."