Most of the excess charges I saw during my AWS consulting were due to dev/test environments with fat 64-bit instances that were left running overnight and durin

Most of the excess charges I saw during my AWS consulting were due to dev/test environments with fat 64-bit instances that were left running overnight and during the weekends. Why? It's relatively easy to stand up environments in the cloud, but shutting them off and redeploying takes forever. There is no efficient way to turn complex stacks off and on without a massive time investment from the cloud ops team. OpDemand solves this with a management toolbar that includes stop/restart functionality. Under the hood we use a combination of EBS volumes and configuration management to allow users to put their cloud environments on ice when not in use. Restarting everything on Monday is a 1-click affair.