Using spot instances for mission-critical workloads always carried the risk of interruptions, making their use, while financially attractive, less than ideal from a reliability perspective. Spot by NetApp has made it possible for cloud consumers to use spot instances for dramatic cost savings while ensuring high availability for all kinds of workloads. Core to our cloud infrastructure offerings is Spot Availability Scores, which are leveraged to provide maximum availability while mitigating risks.

Kubernetes and microservices have opened the door to smaller and more frequent releases, while DevOps CI/CD practices and tools have sped up software development and deployment processes. The dynamic nature of these cloud native architectures makes modern applications not just complex, but also difficult to monitor, find and fix problems.

In the relatively short window of time that Kubernetes has been around, it’s rapidly matured as a critical technology foundation for the cloud, and now even applications that were previously thought to be unviable for containers are running with Kubernetes. As companies expand their usage of it, the need to operationalize Kubernetes with automation and optimization is critical to maintaining speed, agility and control in the long-term.

The cloud native revolution brought by Kubernetes has transformed the way we build and deliver software, but the world of big data has for too long been left on the side of this transformation. Thanks to many contributions from the open source community, Apache Spark integration on top of Kubernetes is now officially generally available with the recent releases this year.

The dynamic nature of cloud native applications is both a blessing and a curse. The ability to use compute, storage, and network resources without managing physical hardware is a real blessing. Your applications can take advantage of the seemingly limitless resources available in the public cloud. Unfortunately, the curse becomes clear when the bill arrives! It is a significant CloudOps challenge to find the balance between providing optimal application performance and minimizing cost.

Spot by NetApp’s Ocean continually optimizes a Kubernetes cluster’s data plane. When Ocean identifies nodes that aren’t being fully utilized, it simulates various bin packing scenarios. Once a more efficient layout is identified, Ocean reschedules pods, and then gracefully terminates the underutilized nodes. Ocean’s continuous optimization of cluster infrastructure saves your organization money and is better for planet Earth!

The cloud not only ushered in a different way of developing and deploying software, but it also introduced a fundamentally different security reality, presenting new challenges to teams responsible for keeping environments secure. Designed to be dynamic, cloud environments can be in a near-constant state of change, with infrastructure resources spun up and down multiple times a day to support cloud applications.