Eight Weeks of Building ParkMyAWS in Public

Eight weeks ago I started posting about building ParkMyAWS.

A scheduler that automatically stops and starts AWS EC2 and RDS instances so dev teams stop paying for compute nobody is using overnight.

Since then I’ve been building and testing. Most evenings after the kids go to bed, some weekends.

Where things stand

This week I’m running the final tests — instance state transitions, AWS API throttling, the boring stuff between a smooth first run and a frustrating one.

Next week I’m looking for the first beta users — a small group of teams running AWS dev or staging environments who want to try it and tell me what’s broken.

What I’m looking for

If you manage AWS dev or staging environments and you’ve ever looked at the bill and thought “we don’t need all of this running overnight,” I want to talk to you.

I’m not chasing scale yet. I want a handful of real users running it on real environments, telling me what doesn’t work, what’s confusing, and what would make them keep using it.

The next thing

Building something alone is mostly just doing the next thing.

This is the next thing.