AWS Lambda + ParkMyCloud = Supercharged Automation
Among the variety of AWS services and functionality, AWS Lambda seems to be taking off with hackers and tinkerers. The idea of “serverless” architecture is quite a shift in the way we think about applications, tools, and services, but it’s a shift that is opening up some new ideas and approaches to problem solving.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out Lambda, it’s a “function-as-a-service” platform that allows you to run scripts or code on demand, without having to set up servers with the proper packages and environments installed. Your lambda function can trigger from a variety of sources and events, such as HTTP requests, API calls, S3 bucket changes, and more. The function can scale up automatically, so more compute resources will be used if necessary without any human intervention. The code can be written in Node.js, Python, Java, and C#.
Some pretty cool ideas already exist for lambda functions to automate processes. One example from AWS is to respond to a Github event to trigger an action, such as the next step in a build process. There’s also a guide on how to use React and Lambda to make an interactive website that has no server.
For those of you who are already using ParkMyCloud to schedule resources, you may be looking to plug in to your CI/CD pipeline to achieve Continuous Cost Control. I’ve come up with a few ideas of how to use Lambda along with ParkMyCloud to supercharge your AWS cloud savings. Let’s take a look at a few options:
Make ParkMyCloud API calls from Lambda
With ParkMyCloud’s API available to control your schedules programmatically, you could make calls to ParkMyCloud from Lambda based on events that occur. The API allows you to do things like list resources and schedules, assign schedules to resources, snooze schedules to temporarily override them, or cancel a snooze or schedule.
For instance, if a user logs in remotely to the VPN, it could trigger a Lambda call to snooze the schedules for that user’s instances. Alternatively, a Lambda function could change the schedules of your Auto Scaling Group based on average requests to your website. If you store data in S3 for batch processing, a trigger from an S3 bucket can tell Lambda to notify ParkMyCloud that the batch is ready and the processing servers need to come online.
Send notifications from ParkMyCloud to Lambda
With ParkMyCloud’s notification system, you can send events that occur in the ParkMyCloud system to a webhook or email. The events can be actions taken by schedules that are applied to resources, user actions that are done in the UI, team and schedule assignments from policies, or errors that occur during parking.
By sending schedule events, you could use a Lambda function to tell your monitoring tool when servers are being shut down from schedules. This could also be a method for letting your build server know that the build environment has fully started before the rest of your CI/CD tools take over. You could also send user events to Lambda to feed into a log tool like Splunk or Logstash. Policy events can be sent to Lambda to trigger an update to your CMDB with information on the team and schedule that’s applied to a new server.
Think outside the box!
Are you already using AWS Lambda to kick off functions and run scripts in your environment? Try combining Lambda with ParkMyCloud and let us know what cool tricks you come up with for supercharging your automation and saving on your cloud bill!
Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on October 19, 2017.
