TecRacer, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) consulting, training, and managed services company, saves its customers tens of thousands of dollars each month using ParkMyCloud’s cloud-management tool.

“What I like about ParkMyCloud: it’s very easy,” said Sven Ramuschkat, managing director of TecRacer. “It’s a simple tool. It’s very sexy.”

Germany-based TecRacer was founded in 2006, and is “more or less a cloud-native company and 100-percent dedicated to AWS,” Ramuschkat said. This allows it to be an AWS specialist, and train and advise customers across nearly all of the cloud provider’s services.

It has around 80 employees and upwards of 500 customers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. “The customers go from big names like BMW or Audi or VW, down to small companies where we just do training for them.”

When the company started providing managed services almost five years ago, it began looking for cloud services to help it manage customers’ instances in a better way. Eventually it started manually scheduling off-times for AWS cloud resources to save customers’ money.

“At first we did it ourselves, shutting down testing servers or servers that did not need to run all night long,” Ramuschkat said. “The problem with these self-made tools: when it comes to a complex scenario you have to extend your own team.”

Then the company discovered ParkMyCloud. Its technology monitors usage across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It then uses that information to make recommendations to “park,” or turn off, cloud resources when they are not being used — for example, at nights and on weekends. In January, ParkMyCloud added automation, which allows users to automate scheduled on and off times for AWS.

One TecRacer customer, a German home builder, has a Citrix server farm with 50 concurrent users, Ramuschkat said. The cluster uses GPU instances for 3D modeling because it needs powerful compute, but that comes at a higher price.

Using ParkMyCloud, TecRacer helped this customer cut its usage and schedule up time only during office working hours. The servers now run about 160 hours per month, instead of 740 hours per month.

“That complete server farm shuts down every day by 7 pm, and restarts by 7 am the next morning,” Ramuschkat said. “In a sever farm you have a starting sequence, and that sequence goes through ParkMyCloud. And they are saving a lot of money.”

The customer now spends $5,000 per month for 160 hours, saving about $18,000 a month.

Other TecRacer customers using ParkMyCloud for testing and development instances typically save between 15 percent and 20 percent on their monthly AWS bill, Ramuschkat said.

“The charm of park my cloud is it’s very focused,” he added. “If you have a new customer and connect to ParkMyCloud within two hours you can have it up and running because it is so easy to use and the customer immediately sees the benefits.”