
Show HN: VMPower – Shutdown/Startup/Backup/Resize VMs with a Calendar - sedouard
https://vmpower.io
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sedouard
Hey everyone! I’m Steve, co-founder at VMPower. I built VMPower because while
working at Microsoft with Azure I noticed there really wasn’t an intuitive way
to schedule power on/off VMs and detect unused ones. It quickly grew into
having automations like resizing and taking snapshots as well as detecting
basic unused resources.

We wanted to keep the following in mind:

1) Scheduling VM actions should be easy like dropping events a calendar

2) It should be pluggable to any cloud. We work with AWS, GCE and Azure

3) Plugging in your cloud subscription should only take 2 minutes

Would love to hear what you think!

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ramisayar
Why not just use Azure auto-off (or just script your VMs to shutdown)?

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sedouard
That's a fair point. You could do that.

Azure does have auto-off today but it still doesn't make it easy to change
that time per-day. It also doesn't have auto-start. You can also group VMs
between resource groups and subscriptions since we flatten all the VMs across
cloud providers, regions & resource groups.

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jmcarless
what kind of savings do you expect a small-medium size company to see by using
this?

and what are the advantages over just trying to just script a simple scheduler
myself?

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sedouard
Depends on how many development VMs they have (CI boxes, jump boxes etc) and
when they're off.

Typically you can save a third of those costs. We also can save a bunch of
time from maintaining scripts, notifications, managing backups and sharing
subsets of VMs with groups of users.

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lexita
Hi Steve, can you give me some more info...I mean it isn't _that_ hard to
script a cron job to just power off your EC2 Vms...

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npkarnik
What % cost savings are customers seeing?

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sedouard
We're seeing a lot of random VMs people are scheduling to shut off. From
jenkins and other CI stuff to servers running things like Tableau.

Typically these people are turning these VMs off during non-working hours so
they're saving about half the cost of those VMs.

Although we're trying to stress that we save lots of time vs writing
automation scripts.

