About EmmanueJoes Solutions
INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
PROJECT LOCATION: KENYA
EmmanueJoes Solutions is a Software Consultancy based in Kenya that deals mainly with QuickBooks a popular Accounting Software among the SMES. The entity whose domain is www.quickbookskenya.co.ke has since its inception in 2005, been committed to providing simple financial Accounting solutions to middle-level and small-scale enterprises through the sale, Training, and customization of QuickBooks Accounting software to suit the customers’ needs in Kenya and Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi.
The challenge
While working with GCP, gradually, one thing that crept up the mind of the CEO of EmmanueJoes Solutions, was how to manage the costs effectively and uniformly across all the projects they were running in GCP. There were a lot of virtual machines they were running in GCP 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. Keeping the instances running at night and during weekends was not cost-effective.
Manually starting and shutting down their virtual machines (VM’s) was a great option to save on cost, but stopping and starting several large groups of VMs by hand/manually every day can was quite tedious. With this, there is equally a higher possibility that one may forget to shut down the VM. This introduces a certain level of human error in the process of saving your hosting costs on your GCP VM.
Partner role in subject
Pawa IT Solutions supported EmmanueJoes Solutions and its affiliated companies to reduce its projects costs in their cloud infrastructure. Providing its GCP expertise, Pawa IT was able to ensure that they stay within their GCP budget through optimization.
The solution
Our custom automation script came in handy to solve the inconsistency. This solution relies on Cloud functions and Google apps scripts to automate the starting and stopping of virtual machine instances at the times specified.
For the QuickBooks related projects, all virtual machines were set to start at 7:00 AM and stopped at 6:00 PM every day. This resulted in them getting billed for just 11 hours a day instead of 24 hours.
The results
This resulted in significant savings in on-demand pricing for that VM because they are billed only for the moment when the VM is running.
