Industry: Transportation
ParkMobile helps its millions of users find and pay for parking on their mobile devices in over 500 cities in the U.S., without having to use meters or kiosks. The company also offers parking reservations for concerts, sporting events, airports, campuses, and more. With a business model facilitating a commodified service, ParkMobile’s business depends on delivering convenience and a seamless experience. With a massive mobile user base, and the need for integrations with CRM solutions, venues, municipalities, payments, and GPS, ParkMobile’s technology stack is complex and can be costly.
At the onset of the pandemic, ParkMobile faced its biggest challenge ever, as drivers stayed home and parking reservations fell significantly. The app’s AWS deployments remained, however – incurring charges while bringing in little revenue. The situation called for rigorous cost analysis and reduction of cloud resources. After vetting several solutions, ParkMobile chose Yotascale for its ability to attribute charges in more detail and for its high-level views of usage and costs in an interface that’s easy to understand for both IT and business users. As parking reservations rose and returned the business to normal levels in 2021, ParkMobile can now better track costs for new product offerings.
“Yotascale breaks costs down in much more detail than any other products. That cost transparency has made our developers much more accountable for the costs they incur, which helps us create and launch better products for our customers.”
Rafael Ramirez
Site Reliability Engineering Mgr.
ParkMobile
The Challenges
- Reduce cloud costs for resources not in use
- Replace AWS usage tools with a more precise and user-friendly cost management solution
- Improve visibility into costs for specific applications and deployments
- View costs for Kubernetes and non-Kubernetes deployments side by side
- Manage reserved and on-demand cloud instances for cost efficiency
The Solution
- Yotascale produces detailed cost data to identify redundancies, overprovisioning, and previously unseen or unused resources.
- Yotascale can attribute costs for individual containers.
- ParkMobile can rely on Yotascale to help the business adhere to strict boundaries for use of reserved vs. on-demand cloud instances.
- Cost insights can be shared with business and product teams.
The Results
- ParkMobile reduced overall cloud costs by 3.5%; the company lowered its RDS spend by 16%.
- As the company measures the value of new offerings such as a toll-paying service, ParkMobile can track cloud resource costs versus revenue.
- Finance teams and C-level executives can access cost and utilization data to inform business decisions.
- Using Yotascale, ParkMobile site reliability engineers can share concrete cloud resource costs with developers teams to raise awareness of budgets and resource optimization.
To learn how Yotascale can help your business reduce costs and increase visibility into cloud usage, visit yotascale.com.