Spinnaker is an open source multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. It is a leading CI/CD tool and provides core feature sets for cluster and deployment management. Created by Netflix and Google, it combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers. As Spinnaker developed new features and integrations, many of Spot by NetApp customers adopted it as part of their DevOps stack.

While Spot by Netapp allows organizations to reliably and affordably run production environments on spot instances, operation teams always want to be alerted about any events of interest that occur in their environment. Over the last 5 years, Spot by NetApp customers have been using our existing notification mechanism and have shared excellent feedback for various enhancements and new capabilities.

When designing a highly available compute environment one needs to determine the infrastructure layout required for uninterrupted application runtime even in the event of component failure. One key factor to be considered when planning for this is the geographic locations of all relevant resources. One must maintain physical separation between different compute resources with identical roles so that if a single datacenter goes down, applications remain operational.

Chances are if you’re a developer or part of a DevOps team you’ve had a polarizing conversation or two about containers versus serverless. In this post we recap a debate hosted by NetApp on this topic. Arguing for containers is Kevin McGrath, Chief Technology Officer, Spot by NetApp. On the side of serverless is Forrest Brazeal, Director of Content and Community at A Cloud Guru. In this post we will cover the key arguments on both sides. YouTube An error occurred.

When EC2 instances fail to serve requests the usual cause is typically hardware issues or high CPU utilization. To avoid sending traffic to instances with these issues, AWS continuously monitors instance health and routes inbound traffic accordingly. In the past Elastigroup fetched the health status for all managed instances and triggered an automatic replacement once an instance was determined as unhealthy.

After working with hundreds of customers over the last few years, we know one thing for sure at Spot by NetApp—when applications have infrastructure that is automatically optimized to meet their needs, they can scale and thrive in the cloud.

The widespread adoption of Kubernetes has made it table stakes for the modern cloud native stack. Software is now being purpose-built for Kubernetes, and as companies enter this new phase of their cloud journey, they are looking to scale this cloud native, Kubernetes-first model. Building upon years of experience with Kubernetes, Spot by NetApp is continuously innovating to bring new ways to help customers achieve this goal.

Repetition is super helpful when learning something new. But eventually we get tired of repetitive tasks, errors start creeping in and the tedium saps us of the creative energy we need to innovate and problem-solve. This is why here at Spot by NetApp we love AWS CloudFormation. It decreases errors, frees teams to focus on their core tasks and when used with our products, helps to dramatically optimize cloud infrastructure cost and utilization.

Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce or EMR, makes it easy to set up, operate and scale big data environments. This enables data scientists and developers to rapidly analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. Combined with Spot by NetApp’s Elastigroup, data scientists can reliably run EMR core and task nodes on highly affordable EC2 spot instances.

In modern cloud architecture applications are broken down into independent building blocks usually as microservices. These microservices allow teams to be more agile and deploy faster. Microservices form distributed systems in which communication between them is critical in order to create the unified system. A good practice for such communication is to implement an event-driven architecture.