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Show HN: VMPower – Shutdown/Startup/Backup/Resize VMs with a Calendar (vmpower.io)
34 points by sedouard 3340 days ago
4 comments

Hey everyone! I’m Steve, co-founder at VMPower. I built VMPower because while working at Microsoft with Azure I noticed there really wasn’t an intuitive way to schedule power on/off VMs and detect unused ones. It quickly grew into having automations like resizing and taking snapshots as well as detecting basic unused resources.

We wanted to keep the following in mind:

1) Scheduling VM actions should be easy like dropping events a calendar

2) It should be pluggable to any cloud. We work with AWS, GCE and Azure

3) Plugging in your cloud subscription should only take 2 minutes

Would love to hear what you think!

Why not just use Azure auto-off (or just script your VMs to shutdown)?
That's a fair point. You could do that.

Azure does have auto-off today but it still doesn't make it easy to change that time per-day. It also doesn't have auto-start. You can also group VMs between resource groups and subscriptions since we flatten all the VMs across cloud providers, regions & resource groups.

what kind of savings do you expect a small-medium size company to see by using this?

and what are the advantages over just trying to just script a simple scheduler myself?

Depends on how many development VMs they have (CI boxes, jump boxes etc) and when they're off.

Typically you can save a third of those costs. We also can save a bunch of time from maintaining scripts, notifications, managing backups and sharing subsets of VMs with groups of users.

Hi Steve, can you give me some more info...I mean it isn't that hard to script a cron job to just power off your EC2 Vms...
What % cost savings are customers seeing?
We're seeing a lot of random VMs people are scheduling to shut off. From jenkins and other CI stuff to servers running things like Tableau.

Typically these people are turning these VMs off during non-working hours so they're saving about half the cost of those VMs.

Although we're trying to stress that we save lots of time vs writing automation scripts.