Managing Microsoft Azure VMs with ParkMyCloud

Microsoft has made it easy for companies to get started using Microsoft Azure VMs for development and beyond. However, as an organization’s usage grows past a few servers, it becomes necessary to manage both costs and users and can become complex quickly. ParkMyCloud simplifies cloud management of Microsoft Azure VMs by giving you options to create teams of users, groups of instances, and schedule resources easily.

Consider the case of a large Australian financial institution that uses Microsoft Azure as its sole cloud provider. In this case, they currently they have 125 VMs, costing them over $100k on their monthly cloud bill with Microsoft. Their compute spend is about 95% of their total Azure bill.

Using one Azure account for the entire organization, they chose to split it into multiple divisions, such as DEV, UAT, Prod, and DR. These divisions are then split further into multiple applications that run within each division. In order for them to use ParkMyCloud to best optimize their cloud costs, they created teams of users (one per division). They gave each team permissions in order to allow shutdown and startup of individual applications/VMs. A few select admin users have the ability to control all VMs, regardless of where the applications are placed.

The organization also required specific startup/shutdown ordering for their servers. How would ParkMyCloud handle this need? This looks like a perfect use case for logical groups in ParkMyCloud.

For detailed instructions on how to manage logical groups with ParkMyCloud, see our user guide.

Putting this into context, let’s say that you have a DB and a web server grouped together. You want the DB to start first and stop last, therefore you would need to set the DB to have a start delay of 0 and a stop delay of 5. For the web server, you would set a start delay of 5 and stop delay of 0.

Of course, you could also manage logical groups of Microsoft Azure VMs with tags, scripts, and Azure automation. However, we know firsthand that the alternative solution involves complexities and requires constant upkeep — and who wants that?

ParkMyCloud offers the advantage of not only to cutting your cloud costs, but also making cloud management simpler, easier, and more effective. To experience all great the benefits of our platform, start a free trial today!

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on October 3, 2017.