A Chat with Sam Booth, CEO at Cloud Waste Reduction Platform: Turn It Off

What is Turn It Off and what do you do?

Turn it Off is an intelligent SaaS-based platform with a mission to reduce cloud waste.

To give you some context, the founders of Turn it Off previously built a business called Just After Midnight back in 2016. A global, cloud-first, managed service provider.

One of the things we learnt on that journey was that the promise of cloud being ‘on-demand’ and therefore cheaper and better for the environment than running your own infrastructure was not always coming to fruition.

The stats back this up – on average 32% of an organisation’s cloud spend is for unutilised infrastructure. If you look at non-production development and test environments this is even greater.

Carbon emissions from cloud energy demand are skyrocketing with the ever-growing migration of legacy applications to cloud, the exponential growth in compute performance requirements, cyber security and artificial intelligence.

Turn it Off was created to put an end to cloud waste by giving end users an easy way to turn off idle cloud environments and resources, and turn them back on at the click of a button. Turn it Off works on all kinds of application infrastructure, from ERP, finance, CRM, AI, digital experience and almost any line of business application.

The good news is that doing something about this waste can help organisations meet their sustainability goals and save some cash along the way, so it’s a win win. 

Do people truly understand what ‘the cloud’ actually is?

Maybe not for some in a consumer context, but in the context of the business users we deal with, it is absolutely understood.

The market has been growing at a phenomenal rate for the last 15+ years and the vast majority of IT professionals have got over the classic objections and come on board. The big cloud hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure are globally recognised platforms within the industry. 

The conversation has moved on from ‘what is the cloud’ or ‘should we be using cloud’ to ‘how can we better optimise our usage of cloud’ and ‘how can we build things in a cloud-native way’.

Organisations that are not cloud native are starting to ask questions on the cost and efficiencies of their IT and engineering departments. This is why we have seen the rise of FinOps disciplines, roles and tools. 

Where I would say the understanding is lacking is on how to use cloud to fulfil the original promise of on-demand, pay-on-execution style products. The reality is that cloud providers like AWS first developed a traditional infrastructure pattern that could be rented for exactly that reason. It was an easy concept to get across. Move your tin/virtual servers to our virtual machines and do the same with your storage. As they have moved from this Infrastructure-as-a-Service led model through to Platform-as-a-Service to a more serverless or function based one, you start to see a lack of understanding from a core IT perspective. We have started to rely more on development teams, hence the rise of modern DevOps and SRE practices over the last 10 years.

That is the reason we built Turn It Off the way we have. It is first and foremost a developer tool, built for the people at the sharp end who can choose to implement niche tech solutions to improve efficiency.

What are the biggest sources of waste when using cloud-based software?

Humans! Most of the waste is stuff being left on, forgotten about, over provisioned and underutilised. 

The reality is that most developers, be they at a start-up or larger enterprise, are under the hammer to get new features and functionality out to market quickly. They are not incentivised or encouraged to optimise or moderate their cloud usage.

Similarly, the IT teams do not want to step on the toes of the business delivering what they need to deliver. Lastly (and somewhat more controversially) even those using an MSP to monitor and manage their cloud can’t rely on this relationship due to the conflict of interest. When your MSP is gaining a profit on resell dollars, though they may have good intentions, they may not be as concerned with highlighting optimisations. It’s simply a matter of incentives.

One of the key areas for this type of waste is non-production environments. This is because these lower environments (think UAT / Test / Development) are only used for a fraction of the time. Even fairly agile teams generally do not have a velocity of more than 1 or 2 deploys per month, for many it is far less. This means that you have these lower environments whirring away for hours a day, unnecessarily.

That is where Turn It Off comes in. Once set up, users can use our smart technology which will detect any latent resources and turn them off when not needed. Alternatively, a schedule or rules can be pre-set which determine when environments and resources needs to be switched on and off. 

Users see instant savings of 70%-90% on their non-production costs. We had a client follow the exact process described above and from day one they found over $1000 and tens of kg of CO2e in savings against a modest spend. 

Surely there are benefits to moving things to the cloud rather than to cold, hard servers?

Yes, do not get us wrong, we are 100% for people making the move to or building from scratch on the cloud. The benefits that were always espoused, if implemented well, are true and relevant today. 

However, you can’t just go in blindly, replicating what you have on-prem and then letting developers have free reign to build, size and manage however they see fit.

The reality is that we are all human and all have priorities (either mandated of us or natural preferences). So, we find that there is a lot of waste in replicated or forgotten databases and unmanaged environments that are left always on unnecessarily. 

Turn it Off is there to help people make the most of cloud, not just highlight its flaws.

How has cloud and SaaS technology developed and progressed over the last few years?

Cloud technology is always evolving. AWS started the trend with what was essentially a few core building blocks of traditional IT (compute, storage, DB) and then kept adding from there. Azure and GCP came to the party a little behind with what were arguably more sophisticated tools but realised you need to have the basics in place first. 

Nowadays, all the major players have a whole host of cloud-native options that you can build on without needing to touch the more traditional services, think AWS Lambda or Azure OpenAI service, for example. 

The path of travel is set in that direction however the skillsets is what slows the whole thing down. The reality is most IT teams and a large percentage of developers still like the comfort and control of those core building blocks and are likely to continue to use the PaaS versions of them for some time to come. 

Have we reached ‘peak cloud’ or is there more to come…if so, what?

Not even close. Whilst more people than ever are using the cloud for their IT needs, AWS and Azure are still showing growth rates of 13% and 30% respectively in the last quarter on already huge numbers ($280 billion this year alone!) 

What is more, with AI workloads, hardly anyone can afford their own on-prem stacks, so it is all going to be cloud based. The energy usage, water usage and financial waste are only going to get bigger – that is why we are trying to do something to help. 

Even if these growth rates have slowed a little, we are still going to have a giant industry, and I do not see many rushing back to manage their own private infrastructure anytime soon. 

What do Turn it Off do that is different to any other cloud-based software providers?

We are in the FinOps (optimising cloud spend) and GreenOps (the same but for emissions) market I will focus on our differentiators within that space. 

Most other FinOps providers focus on using reservations and savings plans to optimise spend in cloud. Whilst you can achieve discounts this way, we argue it is the wrong approach. It goes against the pay-for-what-you-use philosophy and what’s more it does nothing to incentivise reducing your emissions. Imagine if you got fixed price for your energy usage at home – would you be incentivised to turn the lights off? Turn it Off looks to keep cloud, but in a more efficient way.

There are other providers that asses your cloud infrastructure and provide a bunch of data on how and where you might be over provisioned, however, they tend to be light on action so those recommendations can often sit on the desk and go no further until the CFO calls again. Turn it Off takes automated action for you so you do not need to do anything.

Lastly, our tool is built by developers for developers. The platform can be actioned once and quickly so there is no reason not to do it. We also make it easy for the business users to adopt by presenting a user-friendly endpoint which allows them to switch their applications on at a click of a button, without the need for a developer! 

What are your plans for the next couple of years?

For us this is the first of a suite of developer tools to optimise cloud CO2e emissions and spend. We have new functionality being added all the time, so it is very exciting.

Our plans are to get the product into as many hands as possible to see how much CO2e and cash we can save businesses. It’s a great feeling to see the savings figures on our dashboard and the real impact we can have as a business!

We are very lucky to be able to self-fund our development and essentially provide our own pre-seed funding. We have been approached about bringing in some investor capital to GTM across the globe as quickly as possible so that is also something we are giving some consideration to.  

What are the biggest mistakes people make when building SaaS and cloud-based software?

I would not claim to be able to educate people on that! However, from my experience in the service industry and our experience so far with Turn it Off is that shipping the product and getting real feedback is key BUT also understanding that sales is what will make or break you. 

       I am sure we will learn more along the way and we are very lucky to have an experienced team that have worked in the industry for many years in senior positions and as advisors. 

How can we find you?

You can learn more about us on www.turnitoff.ai and email us on [email protected]. Our team is global, spread across Europe, Australia and Singapore, with headquarters in London. We love to meet people in person in our various locations to see how we can work together. So do get in touch!