Intelligent autoscaling has cut compute costs and now manages ephemeral workloads efficiently
What is our primary use case?
My primary use case for Spot revolves around managing and optimizing my compute infrastructure across AWS, mainly EC2 and EKS on a daily basis, such as monitoring the workloads and ensuring that Kubernetes and EC2 instances are provisioned, scaling, and replacing spot instances for ephemeral tasks.
Recently, I have been using Spot for Kubernetes through Ocean, which continuously analyzes pod capacity requirements and adjusts the node groups accordingly. It helps handle node drains, rebalancing, and spot interruption gracefully without requiring custom automation. I have been using it recently for provisioning ephemeral tasks for applications such as stateless applications.
Another main use case for Spot revolves around managing ephemeral tasks or stateless application workloads. Additionally, I focus on cost optimization and optimization of my overall work nodes so that I do not need to manage everything or the nodes for my workloads.
What is most valuable?
Spot overall is a really good tool, and the best feature is the intelligent autoscaling engine it has. It looks at pod requests, historical usage, interruption risk, and pricing trends to choose the best instance type at the lowest cost. The fact that it can mix dozens of instance families dynamically is something which the AWS native autoscalers simply cannot do. I also love the zero-downtime node replacement.
Spot's zero-downtime mode replacement has helped my team by enabling us to reduce our operational overhead. I no longer maintain custom scaling scripts, which has saved several hours or weeks of SRE and DevOps time.
Spot has impacted my organization positively by delivering a very clear ROI. My compute costs have reduced, capacity and production output have increased, and my overhead for maintaining custom scripts or doing some of the tasks manually has been saved. It has saved significant time and resources and given my organization a better competitive edge.
What needs improvement?
I think overall Spot is quite good. The UI is powerful, but it can feel a bit dense for some new users. More guided onboarding would help teams adopt advanced features faster, and deeper insights into Kubernetes resource usage would be beneficial. Overall, it is a really good platform that is quite mature and stable.
I chose a rating of nine because it may sometimes be a bit overwhelming for newcomers, and there are also a few areas in which the EKS Kubernetes level granularity is a little missing. Overall, I think Spot is a really good and stable tool.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Spot for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Spot is stable and quite mature.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Spot's scalability is quite good, and it can be expanded to multiple environments.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is quite good. I did not need to reach out to them a lot, but I think it was good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I was using native solutions only.
Before choosing Spot, I evaluated other options. I was totally dependent on native tools, but I assessed some alternatives such as Cast AI, which was a combination of a few tools including Cast AI and Carpenter for EKS. However, I chose Spot because it provided more automation, smarter instance selection, and had features of many other alternative tools combined in one.
How was the initial setup?
I purchased Spot through the AWS Marketplace.
What was our ROI?
I cannot share the exact number, but I can share the figure that my EC2 and EKS compute cost reduced by around 65 to 75% with Spot. This was because I was able to reduce some workloads for stateless applications, which needed ephemeral storage for running tasks and processing. This has helped me a lot because my overall operational overhead has been reduced significantly, and I save a lot of time from otherwise managing the servers or maintaining everything properly.
I have seen a return on investment as I was able to reduce my compute cost by 60 to 65% for some of my applications that needed light temporary processing tasks with ephemeral storage and stateless applications. It has also reduced some of my overheads because I do not need custom scaling scripts. It has saved me several hours a week for my key SREs and my DevOps teams.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been quite good. The pricing is reasonable and convenient, and the value it offers is completely in line with what I am spending. I think this is really good. However, the exact licensing part is handled by some other members of my team.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend Spot for those looking to run their workloads on AWS, especially those needing cheaper compute for tasks that will not require much for temporary processing. For scaling up and down existing applications, Spot is really one of the best investments you can make, especially for EKS. I gave this product a rating of nine out of ten.
Storage savings have remained limited but automation now reduces manual effort on cloud costs
What is our primary use case?
Our main use case for Spot is to optimize our cloud cost, specifically the AWS cloud cost, by buying proper savings plans and commitments so that we can effectively manage the overall compute savings that we are doing. That is the immediate use case, and in the future, we would like to use Spot Instances and conduct a POC with that to reduce further AWS costs.
In the future, we would like to utilize Spot Instances and implement some automation in place to leverage that aspect from AWS, thereby reducing the overall running compute costs.
What is most valuable?
The best features Spot offers include the overall tool, the dashboard, and the major impact it has in our organization, which is to reduce costs from both a commitment management perspective and with Spot Instances along with the automation behind it.
The dashboard and automation features stand out to me because currently, we do not have a mechanism to detect whether a particular instance is going to expire within AWS when we are using a Spot Instance. Spot helps us detect such changes within AWS at least one hour prior, allowing us to have a mitigation plan in place and host other servers within the same setup to avoid impacting the application. This automation has helped us significantly since previously we were trying to use Spot Instances but were unable to implement that. One use case we plan to implement within the next few months is the overall commitment savings, which we used to manage manually, but with Spot, it automatically helps us detect when and what kind of instances to purchase, making it easier for us to manage our overall commitment for the savings plan.
Spot has impacted my organization positively so far, showing some cost savings to a certain extent. I believe that over the next few months, we will obtain a proper number in terms of cost savings, but I can already see certain cost savings from the past few months.
What needs improvement?
Spot could be improved by adding features that help identify data to optimize storage costs by detecting datasets within our environment based on criteria such as age and usage.
Storage optimization is the only need on my wish list for Spot.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Spot very recently, so it has been close to a year that we are using it.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Spot has been stable so far.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have not yet checked the scalability of Spot because we are using it for all the services running on AWS. As of now, I feel it is meeting our expectations, though I have not tested it for scalability at higher volumes.
How are customer service and support?
My experience with customer support has been good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not previously use any other solution.
How was the initial setup?
Deploying Spot in my environment was quite easy; it did not take long at all, just a few hours to integrate with AWS.
My experience with the configuration process was good; it was straightforward as we followed the documentation and were able to complete it successfully.
What about the implementation team?
I found the procurement process easy since we completed it through the AWS Marketplace, making it straightforward.
There was nothing concerning regarding pricing, setup costs, or licensing, as it was processed through the Marketplace and based on the savings model.
What was our ROI?
I have not seen a return on investment yet. I believe it will take another four to five months to get the return on investment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with the metering and billing has been very good.
There is nothing specific that I did not like about the metering and billing experience.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options before choosing Spot. We were looking at other kinds of tools, but none had the same kind of features as Spot.
What other advice do I have?
I purchased Spot through the AWS Marketplace.
My experience with Spot so far has shown a few noticeable changes. We are not renewing the new savings plan that we were doing earlier, and the changes we have been implementing have helped us to reduce some fraction of cost. However, I believe it will take another five to six months to reflect the actual savings since certain EC2 instances we are running still have an existing savings plan. Once those savings plans expire, we will be able to get the maximum savings out of it.
I find these two features quite useful for us and we have been using them. Spot is very new to us, and over the next few months, we may evaluate more features and possibly conduct a POC with those.
As of now, I can forecast approximately 5% to 7% cost savings that I have noticed.
Cost saving is the main benefit, and the manual effort required for reviewing and purchasing savings plans and other RIs is something we do not have to manage manually now, as we get automatic suggestions from Spot. This additional aspect has helped us significantly. It will take a few more months for us to further review the other features that this product has.
I rated Spot as a four out of five because storage optimization would make it a five for me.
My advice for others looking into using Spot is to definitely proceed with it for a more robust solution in terms of cost management. Spot helps manage savings plans and RIs that are difficult to handle manually. Leveraging the automation feature for managing Spot Instances can provide additional benefits.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Unlock versatile data access with robust SASA solutions
What is our primary use case?
Spot by NetApp is primarily used for backup and also for Fiservware.
What is most valuable?
The product is valuable due to features such as the SASA solution and the disk array from NetApp. The solution offers both block access and file access, making it a nice solution for customers.
What needs improvement?
There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Spot by NetApp for around ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Spot by NetApp is stable, and there are no problems with it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Spot by NetApp has quite good scalability.
How are customer service and support?
We have contacted their support, and they are responsive and helpful.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously worked with Dell Avamar but are now using NetApp solutions.
How was the initial setup?
Deployment usually takes around one day.
What about the implementation team?
Only one engineer is usually involved in the deployment process.
What was our ROI?
It provides a good financial benefit for the organization.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Spot by NetApp is reasonably priced compared to other products on the market. Pricing is around a nine out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
Spot by NetApp is a reliable product with good support, making it recommendable.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
Spot platform aligns all cross-organizational accounts from different CSP for cloud cost governance
What do you like best about the product?
Spot platform by NetApp enables us to assign mandatory tags on all deployed resources, which helps in cloud resource cost segregation quickly.
We can map our cloud infrastructure footprint under a single dashboard & utlize its recommendations to evaluate potential savings.
It provides comprehensive governance control to identify unneded resource deployments and carry out its decomissioning activities in our cloud environments.
What do you dislike about the product?
Since its resource analyzer is cloud-based utility backed up by a cloud provider & region, the availability of Spot instances may fluctuate & may affect the feasibility of cloud optimization strategies.
This is applicable to all service platforms that rely upon Cloud Service Provider (CSP), hence its not a major downside, looking at the overall cloud spend management.
By streamlining our workloads with Spot insights, we determine cost predictions & estimate resource expenditures based on historical data & changes in the anticipated workloads.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Spot platform effectively benefits us by allowing us to identify all underutilized & idle resources which can be terminated for saving resource expenditures.
We can conveniently tag critical resources which handle our priority workload, so that it can be monitored & won't be accidentally interrupted by other deployments.
It offers single pane of glass visibility on various metrics such as cost prediction, resource utilization, and cost trends which greatly helps with our cloud cost analysis.
Since it supports cross-organizational accounts from different CSP, we can quickly build a centralized overview dashboard for resource reclamation, instance optimization and cloud cost governance stategies.
The product is not complete, with some bugs and pages to be improved. The service of spot is good
What do you like best about the product?
The service in chat
the simplicity of the product
a variety of possibilities to use the product
What do you dislike about the product?
The brazilian reseller dont know about the product
the documentation is confusing
some aws permissions is confusing to understanding
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I want to reduce my bill with aws in 30%. My best try is with spotinst
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Its a great option to reduce the AWS bill! Easy to use and great results
Great product overall
What do you like best about the product?
Significantly cuts cloud cost.
Gives applications enough time to gracefully shutdown before evictions most of the time.
Syncs very well with AWS EKS and is very easy to use
What do you dislike about the product?
Pricing is a bit off due to calculation errors. Cost is calculated as a portion of saved expenses - however, these are calculated based on machine types you might not usually use anyway, and therefor calculation is off..
API is not maintained making it difficult to integrate with pipelines.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost reduction. Machine type control and label management
Great idea that saves money
What do you like best about the product?
The knowledge and assistance the support has.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes, the need to reconfigure my environment
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Saving money while managing the environment efficiently.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Nice product and good to have.
Overall we are a happy Spot Ocean user for around 2 years
What do you like best about the product?
Spot Ocean is working in the background and in general we don't need to tweak it too often. It is giving us the cost benefits, with basically no toil at all on the long run. We are using Ocean with almost all our EKS clusters.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is hard to say much that I dislike. Of course, Ocean is an extra layer of abstraction that we need to think about and take it into the calculation, when we are thinking about reserved instances or spot instances. At the same time, utilizing it with Spot ECO, it is relatively simple.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have a fairly seasonal traffic both within a week and within a year. Having many stateless services, our compute resource requirements are fairly varying - following that while also using our instance types and available resources optimally, is a task that is automated for us by Spot Ocean.
Spot Ocean Review
What do you like best about the product?
Spot Ocean simplifies my operations in a way that it's easier to scale
What do you dislike about the product?
I think Spot could come with a larger platform for learning how to manage the benefits it could bring to the table
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have been analyzing and lowering operational costs
