As we discussed in our previous post, the comprehensive visibility into your cloud spend provided by Cloud Analyzer allows you to confidently make decisions on how to best optimize your cloud. But when it comes time to actually optimizing your cloud compute spend, taking advantage of reserved instances – a pricing model that offers steep discounts in exchange for long-term commitment – many potential users still hesitate and for good cause.

Spot by NetApp is excited to announce our designation as an AWS Outposts Ready Partner, as part of the (Amazon Web Services) AWS Service Ready Program. Ocean by Spot can now be deployed on AWS Outposts, bringing the serverless container experience to workloads that require the performance, low latency and availability of on-premise.

As we continue from our previous post on FinOps vs. DevOps let’s review the primary challenge facing all cloud consumers – identifying and managing current and potential cloud waste. In other words, understanding how efficient your cloud strategy and implementation actually is.. Controlling your cloud spend through a simple visualization is the first step to tackle the problem. Cloud Analyzer, a Spot by NetApp cost optimization tool, is a great starting point.

When I first got involved in the cloud space back in 2015 the first thing I was tasked with was talking to our engineers, learning about networking, IT and general DevOps concepts. This allowed me to better understand the cloud, conduct research and provide solutions to our customers and partners.

Ocean by Spot provides key functions that deliver a serverless infrastructure experience for containerized applications by taking care of auto scaling, right sizing and pricing optimization. These features enable users to focus on their applications while the infrastructure is automatically provisioned and managed by Ocean.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication on Container Security provides a comprehensive review of the major risks for core components of a container system. One of the most obvious objects of concern (alongside a host of other things to keep a good security professional up at night) is, of course, the containers running on your platform. Container security is obviously critical to your applications and data.

At Spot, we’re seeing more customers expand their Kubernetes operations, running production workloads with success and seeing positive improvements in performance and agility. Now, these companies are looking to optimize Kubernetes Day 2 operations, with a goal of cost optimization and infrastructure efficiency. Ocean by Spot gives users the leverage to take full advantage of the cloud resources in their container environments.

Gaining visibility into cloud cost and driving greater overall efficiency is an ongoing journey where you need a solid understanding of your organization’s cloud consumption before taking the necessary steps to optimize their spend.

In 2009 AWS (Amazon Web Services) introduced a new EC2 pricing model known as reserved instances. In exchange for an upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years, reserved instances offer significant cost savings (anywhere from ~29% up to 72%) on cloud compute resources compared with on demand instances. Today, other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform also offer similar pricing constructs. In this article you will learn.

Many of Spot’s AWS customers are using Kubernetes Operations (kops) to self-manage their Kubernetes clusters. The tool significantly simplifies cluster set up, lifecycle management via instance groups, Kubernetes Day 2 operations and generates Terraform configurations, making it a popular tool for deploying production-grade k8s clusters.