Challenges: 80% of organizations overrun their cloud budgets, and 34% don’t know their cloud cost at all. Furthermore, clients tend to overprovision and have, on average, 10% more computing capacity available as required. On-demand instances are very expensive, whereas reserved instances are cheaper, however, less flexible. The most affordable option are AWS Spot instances; however, due to a lack of SLAs, they can be de-provisioned at any moment.

However, manual cost management of AWS Spot instances, one-off cloud cost optimization projects, and management of cloud spending in a manual fashion are not smart options in this context. They are comparatively expensive and certainly not the solution for continuous cost improvements.

Solution: AWS Continuous Cost Optimization as a Service powered by Spot for NetApp

Spot by NetApp is a solution set designed to optimize cloud infrastructure services. It leverages AI and automation to optimally align running compute resources with the relevant workload and deploy the most cost-effective resources.

Spot by NetApp offers different flavors

• Eco: optimizes clients reserved instance management
• Storage: recommends rightsizing options for storage
• Ocean: cost optimization for container workloads
• Elastigroup: is ideal for complete automation cost management of AWS Spot instances

The implementation is structured into three phases

1. Analyze – Autodiscover; analyze/assess your workloads in scope; develop and present an optimization plan
2. Automate – Planning and execution of a Proof of Concept [PoC]; check SLAs; plan production migration
3. Accelerate – Connect the existing cloud stacks; add additional use cases, e.g., Big Data, HPC [High-Performance Computing], Single VMs, and many more use cases