Kubernetes and containerization of applications brings many benefits to software development, enabling speed, agility, and flexibility. The maturation of the Kubernetes ecosystem accelerated quickly in the last few years, leaving users with a multitude of choices when it comes to Kubernetes tooling and services. The major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) have introduced services specifically to help users run their Kubernetes applications more efficiently and effectively.

Spot by NetApp allows its users to manage their application infrastructure using a variety of provisioning tools. One of these tools is Terraform, an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows users to build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently. Spot by NetApp solutions supports multiple Terraform resources, such as Elastigroup, EMR Mr scaler, Managed Instance, and Ocean clusters for different cloud providers, and many more.

Modern, cloud-based software development lifecycles have quickly evolved from waterfall and are fully embracing the agile principles of DevOps. As part of this shift, continuous delivery practices have been adopted, giving organizations the capability to deliver and release code faster and more frequently than ever before. CI/CD tools bring velocity — code is always ready to be deployed, enabling organizations to commit multiple times a day.

Together with the release of Spot by NetApp’s Elastigroup support for multiple metrics, we are pleased to share that Elastigroup now also support step scaling, a new functionality that allows Elastigroup customers to configure multiple actions under a single, simple scaling policy. In Elastigroup, each simple scaling policy contains two parts. The first is the AWS metric, which is the metric the data is collected from.

Scalability is one of the main reasons why cloud computing has become so popular. Cloud customers can rapidly react to changes in market needs and demands by automatically launching or terminating resources. This way only the exact number of resources required to serve all incoming requests are running (and being paid for) at any given moment.

Spot by NetApp serves hundreds of customers across industries, with different systems, environments, processes and tools. With this in mind, Spot aims to develop our products with flexibility so that whatever the use case, companies can get the full benefits of the cloud. Spot easily plugs into many tools that DevOps teams are already using, from CI/CD to infrastructure as code, including Terraform.

Spot Ocean offers best-in-class container-driven autoscaling that continuously monitors your environment, reacting to and remedying any infrastructure gap between the desired and actual running containers. The way this typically plays out is that when there are more containers than underlying cloud infrastructure, Ocean immediately starts provisioning additional nodes to the cluster so the container’s infrastructure requirements will be satisfied.

The Spot Jenkins plugin allows Jenkins to manage Elastigroups, enabling users to run servers with spot instances and take advantage of the other Elastigroup features. It’s a powerful integration that Spot is continuously improving in order to give our users even more control over their application infrastructure.