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Meet Bob.

Every Friday, Bob goes to work and leaves his home air conditioning on full blast –  even though no one’s there. He arrives at the office, parks his car and leaves the engine running all day. When Bob goes to the restroom, he washes his hands and leaves the tap water on as he whistles his way back to his cubicle.

Then at 6 p.m. on Fridays, Bob performs what is perhaps his most egregious and wanton act of carelessness and waste: When he leaves the office for the weekend, he keeps all of his company’s AWS instances blazing away, even though no one’s using them.

There are tens of thousands of Bobs out there, unwittingly or callously wasting precious IT budgets by running millions of AWS instances 24x7x365, even when no one’s using them. The result: Bobs are costing companies as much as $1 billion each year.

How could this happen? Wasn’t the cloud supposed to be a utility – an on-demand resource that you pay for only for when you use it? Well, it turns out this isn’t quite true: A real utility has a user-friendly switch that makes it easy to turn off, so you don’t pay for it when you aren’t using it. But public cloud providers must have forgotten to add that switch. In their world, “always on” means “always costing you money.”

What can Bobs do? Is there a solution?  Well, to be sure, there are ways Bob can reduce his cloud spending. He can:

• Use AWS Reserved or Spot instances, which are cheaper but higher maintenance and less flexible.
• Manually turn off each idle instance, but it could take him hours to go through hundreds of instances – every night.  
• Write scripts –  and then constantly update them while maintaining a messy binder full of documentation.

All of these approaches are labor intensive and none are very user-friendly.

But luckily this little saga has a happy ending: There is a new web app that lets you schedule on/off times for your AWS instances, which in typical scenarios reduces cloud spending by at least 20%. It’s called ParkMyCloud.

So don’t be a Bob. Check out ParkMyCloud today.