Cloud cost-efficiency is a crucial ingredient for ensuring business success. However, uncoordinated attempts at reducing costs can create even greater inefficiencies and outright cloud waste. In this post we’ll focus on one example of this – using EC2 spot instances when AWS Savings Plans have already been purchased – and how Spot by NetApp intelligently utilizes all available cloud compute pricing models to eliminate cloud waste and achieve dramatic cost reduction.

During Black Friday 2017 there seemed to be a lot of missing capacity in several AWS regions, even for on-demand instances. As such, some AWS users are wary of using EC2 spot instances going into Black Friday. In this post we will explain how Spot by NetApp can help ensure high availability while fully leveraging spot instances.

Every application has its unique compute infrastructure requirements. This is why container orchestrators such as Kubernetes provide application engineers with the use of taints and affinities to control precisely where pods run.

High performing container workloads rely on infrastructure to match application demands at a moment’s notice. From scaling bursts that require instant compute availability, to traffic lulls that create infrastructure waste, it’s important to keep both availability and cost in mind during the life of a production application.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances are virtual servers used for running applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS). EC2 instances may be billed on a per-hour or per-second basis: AWS provides several ways to reduce EC2 costs, including a free tier, reserved instances, spot instances, and saving plans.

Spot by NetApp’s Ocean continuously ensures all pod requirements are met for immediate scheduling by Kubernetes on the right nodes with intelligent bin-packing for optimal resource utilization. In some cases applications will have instance type dependencies, meaning that the application will run optimally on a specific set of cloud compute instances.

AWS provides some great cost savings opportunities that allow customers to use the best available cloud offering while minimizing ongoing costs. However, there is a tradeoff insofar that a commitment of 1 or 3 years must be made to get discounted rates.