Getting the Most from Cloud Parking

By: Jason Foster

In theory, one of the benefits of cloud computing is that it allows businesses to pay only for the resources they consume. In reality, organizations only unlock that benefit if they excel at cloud parking — which means turning resources off when they’re not needed.

Unfortunately, cloud parking is much easier said than done. Identifying which resources to park, let alone parking and unparking them in a way that doesn’t jeopardize workload reliability or performance, can be quite challenging.

That’s why it’s critical to develop a sophisticated strategy for cloud parking — which this article helps you do. Below, I explain what cloud parking means, why it can be challenging, and how to get the most out of cloud parking by going above and beyond basic practices for turning off unused cloud resources.

See also: FinOps Becomes More Important as Cloud Spending Grows

What is cloud parking?

Cloud parking, a component of FinOps, is the practice of shutting down cloud resources when your business is not using them.

For example, if you have a cloud server instance running on a service like EC2, turning the server off when it’s not hosting an active workload is an example of cloud parking. Later, if you want to use the server again, you’d “unpark” it by starting the instance back up.

Cloud parking is important because almost all cloud services charge, at least in part, based on total running time. By parking cloud resources that you’re not actively using, you stop the pricing meter and avoid paying for resources you don’t actually need. Alongside practices like choosing the right resource configurations and taking advantage of committed-use discounts, cloud parking is a core step toward cloud cost optimization.

The challenges of cloud parking

Shutting off unused cloud resources may sound simple enough. However, it can become challenging in practice for several reasons:

• Identifying unused resources: Determining which cloud resources to park can be difficult, especially in large organizations with multiple teams and sprawling cloud estates. Even if engineers carefully tag cloud resources to help identify their purpose, it’s not always obvious from tags alone whether a resource actually needs to be active.
• Unpredictable needs: It’s not always clear, either when a cloud resource will need to restart — which can become an issue if you need to unpark a resource quickly but you’ve parked it in a way that makes a quick restart impossible. For this reason, cloud parking strategies require insight not just into when resources are not needed but when they might be needed again.
• Lack of automation: The tools and procedures for shutting down or restarting cloud resources vary widely from one type of cloud service to another. As a result, it can be challenging to automate the process, and cloud vendors themselves offer few platforms or integrations to help.
• Complex dependencies: It’s often the case that one type of cloud resource (like a server instance) depends on another (like a storage volume). If you park or unpark interdependent resources in the wrong order, you may destabilize them or make it harder to unpark them at a later time.

In short, while the concept of cloud parking is easy enough to understand, the challenges arise when it comes time to design and execute a cloud parking strategy.

Best practices for cloud parking

The complexity of cloud parking doesn’t mean, however, that the only way to park resources effectively is to take a manual or ad hoc approach. Given the right tools and strategies, you can streamline your parking initiatives in ways that optimize value while minimizing risks.

To get the most from cloud parking, consider these strategies.

Continuously track resource usage

Again, strategies like tagging aren’t enough for identifying which cloud resources to park or predicting when to unpark them. Instead, businesses should continuously and comprehensively track the cloud resources they run and then analyze usage data to detect patterns that can guide cloud parking.

For instance, you might notice through comprehensive resource tracking that a particular cloud server instance only runs one day a week and that it should, therefore, be parked the rest of the week. Labels like “development server” or “weekly backup server” wouldn’t necessarily clue you into when and for how often the server should run, but usa…

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