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US 10,951,542 B2

Tag-Driven Cloud Cost Automation

Status
Granted
Date
2021-03-16
Assignee
Capital One Services, LLC

The Problem

In a large enterprise cloud, thousands of resources — dev environments, test instances, sandboxes, batch workers — sit idle for big chunks of every day, every weekend, every holiday. They’re still billing. Multiply that by the footprint of a Fortune 100 bank and you’re burning real money on compute that nobody is using.

What I Invented

A way to drive the on/off behavior of cloud resources automatically, using metadata tags as the control mechanism. Instead of someone manually shutting things down, the resources themselves carry the schedule with them, and the system enforces it — including restoring whatever state they were in when they need to come back online.

Why it Matters to the Business

Direct, recurring cost savings on cloud spend. Better governance, because the rules are codified into the resources rather than living in someone’s head or a spreadsheet. And it scales — once the pattern is in place, it works whether you have a hundred resources or a hundred thousand.

Scale Fluency

The work behind this patent touched the kind of footprint where a 5% efficiency gain translates into real dollars and a 0.1% reliability improvement translates into thousands of customers having a better day. It represents the discipline required to operate cloud at the scale of a major bank.