New Microsoft Teams Bot to Control Cloud Costs

Today we’d like to announce a new Microsoft Teams bot that allows you to fully interact with ParkMyCloud directly through your chat window, without having to access the web GUI. By combining this chatbot with a direct notifications feed of any ParkMyCloud activities through our webhook integration, you can manage your continuous cost control from the Microsoft Teams channels you live in every day — making it easy to save 65% or more on your instance costs.

Organizations who are utilizing DevOps principles are increasingly utilizing ChatOps to manipulate their environments and provide a self-service platform to access the servers and databases they require for their work. There are a few different chat systems and bot platforms available — we also have a chat bot for Slack — but one that is growing rapidly in popularity is Microsoft Teams.

By setting up the Microsoft Teams bot to interact with your ParkMyCloud account, you can allow users to:

• Assign schedules
• Temporarily override schedules on parked instances
• Toggle instances to turn off or on as needed

Combine this with notifications from ParkMyCloud, and you can have full visibility into your cost control initiatives right from your standard Microsoft Teams chat channels. Notifications allow you to have ParkMyCloud post messages for things like schedule changes or instances that are being turned off automatically.

Now, with the new ParkMyCloud Teams bot, you can reply back to those notifications to:

• Snooze the schedule
• Turn a system back on temporarily
• Assign a new schedule.

The chatbot is open-source, so you can feel free to modify the bot as necessary to fit your environment or use cases. It’s written in NodeJS using the botbuilder library from Microsoft, but even if you’re not a NodeJS expert, we tried to make it easy to edit the commands and responses. We’d love to have you send your ideas and modifications back to us for rapid improvement.

If you haven’t already signed up for ParkMyCloud to help save you 65% on your cloud bills, then start a free trial and get the Microsoft Teams bot hooked up for easy ChatOps control. You’ll find that ParkMyCloud can make continuous cost control easy and help reduce your cloud spend, all while integrating with your favorite DevOps tools.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on May 24, 2018.