Dear Daniel Ek: We Made You a Playlist About Your Google Cloud Spend.

by Jay Chapel | Apr 5, 2018 | Cloud Management, Cloud Services | 0 comments

Dear Daniel Ek,

Congrats on Spotify’s IPO! It’s certainly an exciting time for you and the whole company. We’re a startup ourselves, and it’s inspiring to see you shaking up the norms and succeeding on your first day on the stock exchange.

Of course, with big growth comes big operational changes. Makes sense. As cloud enthusiasts ourselves, we were particularly interested to see that you committed to 365 million euros/$447 million in Google Cloud spend over the next three years.

Congrats on choosing an innovative cloud provider that will surely serve your infrastructure needs well.

But we’d like to issue a word of warning. No, not about competing with Google – about something that hits the bottom line more directly, which I’m sure will concern you.

Maybe a playlist on our favorite music streaming service is the best way to say this:

What do we mean when we say not to waste money on Google Cloud resources you don’t need?

In fact, we estimate that up to $90 million of that spend could be on compute hours that no one is actually using – meaning it’s complete wasted.

How did we get there? On average, ⅔ of cloud spend is spent on compute. Of that, 44% is on non-production resources such as those used for development, testing, staging, and QA. Typically, those resources are only needed for about 35% of hours during the week (a 40- hour work week plus a margin of error), meaning the other 65% of hours in the week are not needed. More here.

That’s not to mention potential waste on oversized resources, orphaned volumes, PaaS services, and more.

Companies like McDonald’s, Unilever, and Sysco have chosen ParkMyCloud to reduce that waste by automatically detecting usage and then turning those resources off when they’re not needed – all while providing simple, governed access to their end users.

Daniel, we know you won’t want your team to waste money on your Google Cloud spend.

We’re here when you’re ready.

Cheers,

Jay Chapel

CEO, ParkMyCloud