Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2023

Ocean for Apache Spark releases Azure support

NetApp is pleased to announce General Availability of its Spot Ocean for Apache Spark™ product on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Customers can now choose to have Spot optimize and manage their AI and data engineering projects at scale on many kinds of infrastructure. Spot’s SaaS product removes the effort, complexity, and risk of setting up and running Apache Spark yourself. It also improves the performance and efficiency of data scientists’ Jupyter Notebooks.

The Spot for FinOps: Accelerating customers' FinOps journey with enhanced insights, efficiency and optimization

In an uncertain and turbulent economy, organizations have made it a critical priority to ensure they are managing cloud spend to stay within their cloud budgets and efficiently optimize that spend while leveraging the cloud to achieve business growth.

Deploy AWS spot instances with Elastigroup

AWS spot instances represent AWS’s excess capacity, available for any surge in customer demand. To offset the loss of idle infrastructure, AWS offers this excess capacity at a massive discount to drive usage. With up to 90% in savings when compared to on-demand pricing, spot instance pricing is an affordable option for organizations looking to significantly reduce their cloud bills. One of the challenges with spot instances, however, is that they can disappear at a moment’s notice.

Ocean CD is now available: Control Kubernetes application changes with reliable continuous delivery automation

In the beginning, cloud cost savings were the focus for Spot. As we grew, our customers helped us understand that cloud cost reduction is just one of the many challenges they face when operating in the public cloud. Spot by NetApp has since invested in and developed multiple solutions that can promote FinOps best practices and equip DevOps with comprehensive infrastructure automation and optimization solutions for VMs and containers.

Ocean CD from Beta to Availability: 12 months of valuable customer feedback

As part of the Ocean CD GA release, we took some time to reflect. Ocean CD beta version was released a year ago with a plan to focus on progressive deployment strategies (Canary and Blue-Green deployments). The curiosity and eagerness Ocean CD created among the Spot by NetApp community helped advance its development and made it clear that our customers need a solution that meets their requirements.

The State of CloudOps in 2023: Driving success with cloud automation

Modern businesses are rapidly expanding their use of public cloud for an ever-growing list of applications and services. But as more cloud-focused solutions are thrown into the mix, the more complex things get for enterprises. Every cloud has its rules, tools, and processes, but businesses often struggle to fill their teams with specialists for one cloud provider, let alone multiple.

Ocean CD is now generally available: Control Kubernetes application changes with reliable continuous delivery automation

In the beginning, cloud cost savings were the focus for Spot. As we grew, our customers helped us understand that cloud cost reduction is just one of the many challenges they face when operating in the public cloud. Spot by NetApp has since invested in and developed multiple solutions that can promote FinOps best practices and equip DevOps with comprehensive infrastructure automation and optimization solutions for VMs and containers.

Ep. 3: FinOps for the Rest of Us Featuring Sara Gadallah

In this episode of Cloud Control, host Shon Harris and Sara Gadallah, Principal Cloud FinOps Analyst at Atlassian and a FinOps Foundation Ambassador discuss the role FinOps plays in CloudOps. FinOps is a rapidly transforming landscape that plays a crucial role in driving business growth, efficiency, and transparency. Sara shares her journey into FinOps, the practices of FinOps, and how collaboration between different teams is essential in taking informed decisions on cloud cost optimizations.

Ep. 4: FinOps for the Rest of Us Featuring Sara Gadallah

On this episode, Shon Harris talks with Sara Gadallah, Principal Cloud FinOps Analyst at Atlassian, to discuss the role FinOps plays in Cloud Ops. FinOps is a rapidly transforming landscape that plays a crucial role in driving business growth, efficiency, and transparency. Sara shares her journey into FinOps, the practices of FinOps, and how collaboration between different teams is essential in taking informed decisions on cloud cost optimizations. They also discuss the importance of continuous collaboration and education, the culture change needed to drive engineers to see cost as another operational metric, and the alignment of FinOps and data security.

Azure Reservations vs. Savings Plans: What's the difference?

Microsoft launched Azure in 2010 as a direct response to Amazon and Google’s cloud efforts. From humble beginnings as an extension of Windows NT, Azure now supports cutting-edge IT services, including AI/ ML, Big Data, Kubernetes, and more. Recent reports show Microsoft Azure taking more of the cloud market share than ever before. Like AWS and other cloud providers, Azure offers both reservations, for virtual machines and a variety of other services, as well as Savings Plans.

Ep. 3: Who's Watching Your Cloud? Featuring Bill Mulligan

Description: In this episode, Shon dives into the thrilling universe of eBPF with expert Bill Mulligan in this episode of the Cloud Control Podcast. Explore eBPF's transformative impact on cloud computing, development environments, and security. Discover its usage from tech giants like Facebook to everyday Android devices. Venture into the open-source journey of Cilium, an eBPF-based project with diverse applications such as multicluster networking and observability.

Account Credentialing

In this webinar, we cover how credentialing your AWS Payees and Azure Subscription can give you a deeper reporting tool beyond just cost and billing. How it can unlock Cost Savings, Best Practice Checks, Right Sizing, Resource Inventory and Utilization reports, Security, and Compliance. There are a few ways to go about credentialing, join us as we discuss standard configuration and API based configuration.

Spot and AWS deliver an integrated deployment experience with CloudCheckr Built-in solution

Spot by NetApp is thrilled to announce its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop a CloudCheckr with AWS Built-in solution that automatically installs, configures, and integrates with native AWS Cloud Foundational Services across multiple domains, such as identity, governance, security, and operations. As a premier partner of the AWS Built-in program, CloudCheckr is now offered as a turn-key solution that can be deployed quickly and easily through the AWS Marketplace.

Ep. 3: Who's Watching Your Cloud? Featuring Bill Mulligan

On this episode, Shon dives into the thrilling universe of eBPF with expert Bill Mulligan in this episode of the Cloud Control Podcast. Explore eBPF's transformative impact on cloud computing, development environments, and security. Discover its usage from tech giants like Facebook to everyday Android devices. Venture into the open-source journey of Cilium, an eBPF-based project with diverse applications such as multicluster networking and observability. Find out why Cilium is the go-to CNI for all leading cloud providers.

Run container-optimized EKS clusters with Ocean and Bottlerocket OS

AWS is one of the primary providers for services that help users deploy and manage their containerized applications in the cloud. Since launching ECS in 2014 and EKS in 2017, AWS has learned a lot about running containers at scale and in production. In 2020, AWS developed Bottlerocket OS, a new operating system for hosting containers. This OS was specifically designed to address gaps left by the ECS and EKS-optimized AMIs, which are based on operating systems that run traditional software applications.

The 2023 State of CloudOps report from Spot by NetApp is here

SAN JOSE, Calif. — June 7, 2023 — NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, today released its 2023 State of CloudOps report, an annual survey exploring the current state of CloudOps and how IT decision makers feel about the ways their organizations are working to optimize their environments.