Spot by NetApp’s Ocean includes a powerful feature called “cluster roll.” This feature simplifies applying changes to Kubernetes worker nodes. Typical changes include applying a new image, modifying or adding user data, and updating security groups. A cluster roll applies these changes without having to disable the Ocean autoscaler. It also removes the need for you to manually attach new nodes or remove replaced nodes from the cluster.

Most Apache Spark users overlook the choice of an S3 committer (a protocol used by Spark when writing output results to S3), because it is quite complex and documentation about it is scarce. This choice has a major impact on performance whenever you write data to S3. On average, a large portion of Spark jobs are spent writing to S3, so choosing the right S3 committer is important for AWS Spark users.

As companies move more applications into the cloud, and package them into containers, environments become more complex with limited visibility. While infrastructure is abstracted away as much of it is delivered by the hyperscalers, this creates an opaqueness that makes it hard to control costs and understand resource utilization. As a result, many companies are experiencing high cloud bills and lots of cloud waste.

Whether you’re using a managed Kubernetes service like AWS EKS, GCP GKE or Azure AKS, or self-managing a DIY cluster deployed with open source tools like kops and Kubespray, the underlying hardware can vary from container to container. Each container requires specific resources (CPU/ memory/GPU/network/disk) and as long as the underlying infrastructure can provide those resources, the container will be able to execute its business logic.

Spot Ocean delivers container-driven autoscaling to continuously monitor and optimize your cloud environment. Positioned at a busy crossroads in the application deployment pipeline, Ocean has a critical role when shipping new containers. Given the highly dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments, events happen constantly and take shape as logs in Ocean. These can help you understand the chain of events in different scaling scenarios, from debugging cluster issues to incident analysis.

Many of Spot by NetApp customers run Jenkins as a core part of their CI/CD processes and use it together with Spot’s Elastigroup to deploy jobs running on spot instances. This integration has helped our customers realize up to 90% savings on cloud computing, and seamlessly fits into their existing DevOps workflows.

Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It is one of the most widely-used provisioning tools in the industry to enable infrastructure as code (IAC), made popular by its ease of use and simple, but powerful automation. With easy integration, you can use Ansible and Spot to fully automate and optimize your cloud infrastructure.

More and more, DevOps and platform teams are using infrastructure as code to design and implement infrastructure in the cloud. Hashicorp’s Terraform is one of the most popular infrastructure as code tools. It enables you to define your desired state of infrastructure using code, and deploy those changes to your cloud. Spot by NetApp has extensive support for Terraform in Elastigroup and Ocean, our products for cloud infrastructure management.

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.