As one of the most effective ways to dramatically reduce cloud compute infrastructure costs, EC2 spot instances have always played a role in managing cloud costs, with the eye-popping potential of up to 90% cost reduction. However, the fact that AWS can interrupt them at any given time, has not done much for their popularity. Yet in today’s volatile global economy, companies need to explore how to use this powerful means of cost reduction all while ensuring high availability.

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open source platform. You can use it to automate, scale, and manage container workload distribution. K8s is ranked amongst the most widely used container orchestration tools. Many Kubernetes users run it in a public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure. You can use Azure resources for Kubernetes without worrying about lock-in.

Ocean by Spot provides continuous optimization for the underlying infrastructure of containerized workloads. Launch specifications is a key feature that enables users to manage different types of workloads on the same Ocean cluster. With launch specs, cluster administrators can granularly set specific configurations per application, as needed.

If you are running compute workloads in Azure and wondering how you can dramatically reduce costs and minimize infrastructure management all without affecting availability and performance, keep on reading. Back in May Azure introduced a new pricing model, called Azure Spot VMs, providing up to 90% cost savings in comparison to the pay-as-you-go pricing.

As more companies plant their IT systems in the cloud, DevOps methodologies are being embraced to accelerate these digital transformations. Part of DevOps adoption is the implementation of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, bringing automation to the software delivery process.

Spot by NetApps’s Ocean now makes it easy to run your ECS tasks on any combination of on-demand, spot and reserved instances all within a single cluster. Ocean provides Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) users with an automated, serverless container experience. Previously, control over the underlying instances’ pricing model was limited to utilizing reserved instances and spot instances only.

As we discussed in our previous post, the comprehensive visibility into your cloud spend provided by Cloud Analyzer allows you to confidently make decisions on how to best optimize your cloud. But when it comes time to actually optimizing your cloud compute spend, taking advantage of reserved instances – a pricing model that offers steep discounts in exchange for long-term commitment – many potential users still hesitate and for good cause.

Spot by NetApp is excited to announce our designation as an AWS Outposts Ready Partner, as part of the (Amazon Web Services) AWS Service Ready Program. Ocean by Spot can now be deployed on AWS Outposts, bringing the serverless container experience to workloads that require the performance, low latency and availability of on-premise.

As we continue from our previous post on FinOps vs. DevOps let’s review the primary challenge facing all cloud consumers – identifying and managing current and potential cloud waste. In other words, understanding how efficient your cloud strategy and implementation actually is.. Controlling your cloud spend through a simple visualization is the first step to tackle the problem. Cloud Analyzer, a Spot by NetApp cost optimization tool, is a great starting point.

When I first got involved in the cloud space back in 2015 the first thing I was tasked with was talking to our engineers, learning about networking, IT and general DevOps concepts. This allowed me to better understand the cloud, conduct research and provide solutions to our customers and partners.