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.

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.

A flexible architecture is critical for dynamic containerized applications but managing different infrastructure configurations to support different applications is a heavy lift, requiring significant time and effort. The major cloud providers do offer customers core capabilities to deploy, manage and scale cloud infrastructure through AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs), GCP Instance groups and Azure Scale sets.

Here at Spot by NetApp we’re continuously innovating our machine learning models used for identifying and predicting spot capacity usage and interruptions for all major public clouds (AWS, Azure and GCP). These proprietary algorithms expand the ability to utilize spot capacity for production and mission-critical workloads, allowing our customers to enjoy up to 90% cloud compute cost reduction with SLAs and SLOs that guarantee availability.

Over the past 15 years, application architectures have evolved dramatically, from bare metal servers to virtualization technology, to elastic compute, auto scaling and containers. Recently, we’ve seen another shift to the serverless paradigm, where even the operating system is abstracted from developers and ops teams. Customers want fully-managed compute, but still want to use their existing application development tools and pipelines.

Cloud Manager allows NetApp users to manage, monitor, automate and optimize their data storage in the public cloud as well as in hybrid environments.