Interview: Atlassian Bamboo Automation + ParkMyCloud for AWS Cost Savings

We talked with Travis Rehl, Director of Application and Engineering at Siteworx, about how his team is using ParkMyCloud in conjunction with Atlassian Bamboo automation in order to improve governance and optimize their AWS cloud infrastructure. Below is a transcript of our conversation.

Can you start by telling us about SiteWorx and what you guys do?

Sure, so Siteworx is a company that does digital transformations for clients, and my particular piece of it is Managed Services Hosting. We host ecommerce and content management systems for clients, generally Fortune 500 Companies or larger. We host specific products in AWS, and we’re moving into Azure as well.

What is your role in the company?

I am the Director of Application and Engineering here at Siteworx. I run the Siteworx services group which includes our hosting department as well as our application development team which supports our “run” phase of an engagement with a client.

Who in your organization is using ParkMyCloud?

We are currently using it for our Siteworx internal infrastructure, both EC2 and RDS, but I have some ideas to add it as a part of our managed services offering.

In the app we have maybe 5 or 6 users. They are team leads or engineering managers who have identified the scheduling that is appropriate for those particular instances and AWS accounts. This gives them the ability to group different servers together by environment levels for different clients. One person from our finance team has access to it for billing and reporting.

My team in particular that is using ParkMyCloud is our engineering and operations group. There are two different teams who are the main ParkMyCloud users: our Operations team is 24/7, our Engineering team is generally 9–5 Eastern. They use ParkMyCloud to reduce costs, and have implemented it in such a way that will give the ability for our Development teams to turn servers back on as needed. If they have a project or demo that is occurring at an off hour, they are able to hit a button through our automation system — we’re using Atlassian Bamboo automation — to turn on the servers and utilize them.

Can you tell us more about that Atlassian Bamboo automation system?

If a team member wants to deploy code to a server during off hours, they will have a button within Bamboo to press to turn the server on via the ParkMyCloud API. Then they can hit a second set of buttons to send their code changes out to it. We utilize the calendar “snooze” function that PMC offers.

What were you looking for when you found ParkMyCloud?

I was looking for a technology that would allow us to optimize and automate our AWS cloud management. Internally, we have an agenda of trying to branch out to as many cloud platforms as necessary. So I was looking into many different services that manage your cloud-based servers and are compatible with different providers. That is when ParkMyCloud was suggested to me by a friend. We started a free trial, and got in touch with you all.

I am all in on ParkMyCloud, and I think we have a lot of use for it and down the road we plan to work with our clients to incorporate into our service offering.

Do you have any other cost control measures in place for AWS?

We evaluate server performance using Trusted Advisor in AWS or other services that say that you could scale down. The issue with those other services is that they are sometimes inaccurate because they use average CPU usage that does not take into account server down time. We try to evaluate and scale down as necessary based on the CPU usage when it is active.

How did the evaluation with ParkMyCloud go?

After we did some initial research on ParkMyCloud and other tools, we got in touch with PMC, started a free trial, did a demo, and a few questions we needed clarified — the entire process took just a couple weeks. The platform is entirely self service, and the ROI is immediate and verifiable.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on August 8, 2017.