A New Way to Manage Your Resources (and Costs) in the Cloud

Are you tired of doing multi-variate calculus to understand your Azure or Amazon (AWS) bills or overages?

One of the big advantages customers experience from using CloudShare is keeping their infrastructure costs low by being able to know whether a machine is in-use or not, and taking an automated action as a result. Customers who have been using CloudShare ProPlus know the main licensing model automatically suspends environments that are not in use to provide you with attractive pricing – your usage and what you’re paying is completely transparent.

In our products for TeamLabs and Sales, our customers demand a different kind of flexibility to avoid having to pay overages. As a DevTest team using CloudShare TeamLabs, you can set up your own run policies that can be used throughout your organization. You can decide, for example, that a customer demo can run for four hours, after which the environment is kept on disk for a week – in case the customer wants to revise the demo. A QA organization can decide to have the environments live forever and only be deleted manually when testing with the environment is completed.

For automated tests, you may decide that the test automation scripts will delete the environments as they’re done testing them – but have CloudShare delete any environments that have not been accessed for the last, say three hours. Along these lines, the key requirement we’ve made available in TeamLabs is that CloudShare Administrators be able to set the run policies that will be used by their organization.

So, how do you set a policy in CloudShare? A policy consists of three main parameters:

• Storage Lease – how long should the environment be kept on disk unless extended.
• Runtime Lease – the amount of time the environment is allowed to run unless extended.
• Inactivity – here you select what should be done upon inactivity and how long to wait before conducting the automatic action. Possible operations are Suspending the environment or Deleting the environment.

CloudShare Administrators can easily create, delete and rename these policies in order to provide the best solution for their own team.