Greetings from Las Vegas, and the first “normal” AWS (Amazon Web Services) re:Invent since the show in 2019! We made it! Now begins the recovery and the slog back to “normal.” It does not matter if it was your first, third, or even fifth AWS re:Invent experience. You always end up walking away learning something new or finding new tools that you did not know you needed, and as always, more swag and freebies from the convention floor than you thought possible.

Notifications help us keep track of everything going on, anywhere and anytime. Until today, Spot provided a tool for configuring notifications on events that occur in your spot account’s resources. This tool allows users to create, manage, and register to notification policies and choose from which integration to receive notifications (email, Slack, webhook, and SNS). And with all that goodness, we are here to improve your experience even more!

Earlier this year, a new user management system was announced, designed to give Spot’s users more granular control on their Spot resources at both the organization and account levels. As we got very good feedback from customers, we are now happy to announce a new feature in the user management system called Custom Policy Conditions. The condition feature allows users with policy modification access to create conditions within the policy.

Prior to the pandemic, the notion of hybrid work was foreign and in most cases was for the “exceptional situation”. There used to be a small group of remote workers who weren’t near the office, and the road-warriors who were rarely in the office. On average though, working in the office was the norm. Beginning in 2020, there were headlines, articles, research, and statistics on how hybrid work is here to stay.

Elastigroup predictive autoscaling uses a machine learning algorithm to accurately predict the CPU utilization pattern of your workloads and increase the number of instances based on the projected CPU utilization. Predictive autoscaling also helps in cases where your instances/applications take a lot of time to boot up. Predictive autoscaling can scale the instances in advance of the actual traffic and thus saving up to 30 minutes of startup time.

Today, we are excited to announce that, Spot by Netapp’s Elastigroup can support the use of multiple AMIs in a single Elastigroup. The release of this feature allows customers to utilize both AWS Graviton and x86 instances in the same groups and allows the Elastigroup autoscaler to launch instances based on the best spot pricing and availability in real time.

On August 31st 2022, Amit and Aditya shared a blog post discussing the Emergence of Cloud Desktops. This struck a chord for me because it tells the story of where we are, how we got here, and where we are going. End-user computing (EUC) is fast evolving with new inventions taking place often.

Is the lack of cost visibility in your Kubernetes cluster driving you crazy? Do you spend hours trying to decipher your cloud provider bill in order to break down the cost per team or per service (chargeback)? Kubernetes certainly simplifies deployment, management, and scaling of applications but for cost visibility, look no further, Ocean Cost Analysis is your answer. It provides Kubernetes application level visibility to your cloud provider costs.

End user computing is a popular target for malware attacks. Virtual desktops are no exception. As noted in previous posts, Spot PC emphasizes a “security in layers” approach to securing virtual desktop sessions. This includes using Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and their built-in user identity and security management offered by Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Spot PC also enables Defender for Cloud for every managed virtual machine.

Spot by NetApp is pleased to launch a new API that returns all Ocean managed nodes in a cluster. This new “Get Nodes” API provides detailed information about the nodes in the cluster as well as Ocean related information. Ocean is an automated cloud infrastructure SaaS for containers. With any automated system, it is essential to have ways to monitor what it is doing on your behalf.