Announcing PowerDown | Lower Cloud Costs
Feb 21, 2018
We’re excited to announce the PowerDown cloud cost optimizer. You are welcome to try PowerDown and start reducing your cloud bills today.
PowerDown
PowerDown reduces your cloud spend by automatically powering down idle cloud servers, databases and containers. It uses dynamic schedules to automate the scheduling of cloud resources and high-level resource groups so you can control entire environments with a single command.
This post describes the initial features for the PowerDown service and what is the problem with existing solutions.
Lowering cloud costs
The convenience and flexibility of cloud computing is compelling, but it can quickly become expensive and wasteful as you create more servers, databases and containers. Today, a modern DevOps team needs access to resources for development, test, stage and production, so the total number of cloud resources quickly multiplies and cloud spend escalates.
However, many of these resources, are not required 24x7 and some may be only required during certain business hours. By simply powering down these resources, companies are realizing savings of up to 70% of their cloud bill.
The problem with existing solutions
There are two key problems with existing cloud scheduler solutions:
- Existing schedulers force you to manually create a single schedule (in one timezone) that represents the needs of all your users.
- They require that you manage resources at the instance level and that you power on and off individual servers.
Single manual schedule
Availability needs are constantly changing for a DevOps team and existing solutions put the burden of tracking those changes onto you. They force you to collect and track all user resource availability needs and then you must manually create a single unified schedule. For dispersed and dynamic teams, this is not an easy task. Changing user requirements means manually changing the schedule. This is error prone and quickly becomes tedious.
Instance level management
Turning servers on and off at the instance level demos well, but operates poorly in practice. DevOps teams typically need to power up and down entire environments such as “test” or “staging”. While it is possible to manually turn on and off all the individual resources in an environment, doing so repeatedly at scale has too much overhead.
The problem with existing solutions and cloud schedulers is that they are too static, low-level and require manual configuration and maintenance of the resource schedules.
Our goals
We wanted to create a cloud optimizer that would eliminate the “manual” effort from creating and updating resource availability schedules. We want users to be able to simply state when they need resources or environments to be available and have the cloud optimizer determine the actual schedule for each resource.
We believe that users should be able to describe their needs in their own timezone without converting to GMT or a single common timezone. Furthermore, users should be able to temporarily override the schedule without having to convene a meeting or coordinate with other users over Slack!
Users should be able to request that servers, databases, containers or complete environments be available without having to consider the possible resource dependencies or overlap between other user schedules for the individual resources.
PowerDown Dynamic Schedules
PowerDown uses Dynamic Schedules to transparently aggregate the availability needs of all users. Each user specifies their needs in their own timezone and can update or change schedules at anytime. PowerDown instantly recomputes the effective schedule and adapts accordingly.
Users can easily create temporary overrides for unexpected needs. PowerDown takes these user inputs and then automatically manages the availability of resources.
Users can temporarily override the schedule and require that a resource be available for a specified number of hours or until a designated time. The schedule does not need to be updated and will resume once the override passes.
PowerDown resource environments
With Powerdown you can simply power up or down servers, databases and containers. You can do this via the web application, the CLI or via the REST API. But PowerDown goes beyond this low-level approach by organizing resources into Resource Groups. These are ordered, optionally nested collections of resources that constitute a combination of resources or a complete environment such as “test” or “staging”. Resource groups can contain servers, databases, containers, external resources and other resource groups. When you power up a resource group, you power up all the members of that group in sequence.
PowerDown manages the dependencies for you and resolves the schedules from each user for all the resources in the group.
CLI
The PowerDown CLI provides convenient acces via the command line. You can list resource status, show detailed status for resources and power on and off resources and resource groups.
And now this …
There is much more to PowerDown including one click setup, automatic resource discovery, actual and projected cloud costs, role based security, a REST API and usage statistics.
Register for a free trial
You are welcome to register for a free trial for PowerDown or go to www.powerdown.io to learn more.
Originally published at www.powerdown.io on March 1, 2018.
