Show HN: Cut your AWS costs by stopping non-production resources when not needed

Hello HN community! Sri and Brian here from CloudPal (https://www.cloudpal.io/). We are building a tool to help companies reduce their cloud costs by stopping non-production resources when they’re not needed.

The problem: Almost every company on the cloud struggles with cost management. While optimizing production costs can be complex, reducing non-production costs should be a straightforward case of shutting down resources when they’re not in use. However, most companies lack an elegant solution for this.

The solution: CloudPal

- A downtime scheduler for non-production resources (currently supports AWS EC2 & RDS)

- start / stop button, allowing users to override the schedule (eg. if working on weekends).

Next up on the feature roadmap is:

- Intelligent start / stop functionality for non-production resources - resources will automatically stop when not in use and quickly spin back up when needed, resulting in lots more delicious cost savings!

- Support for more cloud providers and resource types (eg. ECS, K8s, etc.)

We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.

Many thanks,

Sri & Brian

At $WORK we use a tool named Cloud Custodian that does this, and can do so for almost all resources. We use it almost exclusively for EC2 and other resources in our dev account where at midnight EST it shuts down all resources.

Users can override it by adding a custom tag to their resources to change the hours or not have the workload shut down. It's reduced our AWS costs tremendously.

Since we heavily push using terraform even for dev stuff, users can quickly re-spin up their instances, fix DNS records and the like with a terraform apply to get back up and running when they get back to their desk.

sriprasanna · 4 years ago

You are absolutely correct. Cloud Custodian is a great tool and some of customers had similar tools built internally. However the real pain point was the maintenance part of these and especially companies with limited cloud expertise, hence they like CloudPal's appeal.

Another primary reason for them to prefer CloudPal is that most software engineers can use CloudPal without a lot of IaC or AWS knowledge such as tagging resources.

Komodai · 4 years ago

Are Naxes, SLawlor82 and mia2670 your friends? Or your accounts?

Deleted Comment

My friends actually.

ArchOversight · 4 years ago

srebeatz · 4 years ago

Good idea, this can be out of box solution for many organisations with limited team size. Will defo look forward for the smartness of system for self start/stop on the demand over the CRON'd approach along with cost analysis reports how much the system saves with/without (this would help to convince the managers ;) ) along with suggestion on reserved/saving plans and many more...

All the very best on the project Sri and Brian. _Eyes on this_

reachbharathan · 4 years ago

This will be very useful feature Sriprasanna, In my previous stint even non production environment monthly cost were upto 8000 usd per month, due to the amount of services we were using. Kudos to go.

KronisLV · 4 years ago

The large amount of similar comments by new accounts makes this seem a bit iffy. Especially given that most of those comments were flagged.

Good luck on your project, though.

Thanks very much.

sowdilana · 4 years ago

Cutting AWS costs have been crucial in many of the projects I have worked recently.

Great to offload some of the work to the tools like this!

Congratulations and All the best

Sri & Brain

allynjalford · 4 years ago

I have code written into business processes that do that. It would be great to have a dashboard visual with buttons.

dibarreno · 4 years ago

Great product and fit! It has high investment potential.