How to gain holistic visibility and continuous optimization for AWS with Spot by NetApp

In today’s fast-paced business world, the best way to get a handle on your organization’s cloud costs is by using automation to optimize cloud cost and resource utilization. Today, this can be achieved through Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps).

FinOps is an operational practice that enables data-driven decision making around cloud costs and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams. To deliver an effective FinOps strategy requires three key interlinked – and ideally continuous – processes: visibility, cost optimization, and cloud infrastructure optimization – all driven by automation.

1. Gain holistic visibility across AWS

To be effective, automation requires visibility. Without the right visibility you and any automation you use may be relying on the wrong data, misinterpreting data points, missing trends, or incorrectly charging a cost center for their cloud consumption.

Spot by NetApp’s Cost Intelligence provides a single source of truth for current and historical costs for resources. This includes insights and trends on resource efficiency, consumption, and waste and recommendations for opportunities for cost savings and optimizations.

Delivered through interactive dashboards and consumable reports, Cost Intelligence can understand and reflect the nuances of the AWS pricing models and can consume its billing information. Beyond that, Spot by NetApp’s Billing Engine can align cloud spend to their applications, business units, and/or other defined cost centers.

With Spot by NetApp, you can achieve continuous visibility and analytics across your global AWS footprint without the hassle of having to figure it out.

2. Continuously optimize costs

Successful teams must be empowered to act on cost optimization opportunities immediately.

This includes terminating or adjusting sources of wasted spend (e.g., unutilized, underutilized, or unattached resources), right-sizing instances, as well as migrating older generation resources to more cost-effective ones. It can also include moving storage resources to more economical options and/or to more cost-effective regions while still meeting failover and data recovery requirements.

Many of these processes can be automated by Spot by NetApp. They can be triggered by implemented through best practice checks or policy-based alerts. And, given the constant changes in both cost and compute, they must be performed continuously to deliver accurate, impactful, and measurable results that drive greater cost efficiencies.

Moreover, with Spot Eco you can also continuously and automatically optimize commitments, including Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans, all without sacrificing flexibility and risking financial lock.

3. Cost efficiently optimize your AWS infrastructure

Historically, infrastructure optimization has not been considered a foundational component of FinOps. Yet cost optimization processes directly impact the infrastructure provisioned for application workloads and vice versa.

And while it may be cost effective to change a resource type to a cheaper one, such a change could negatively impact the performance or reliability of a critical business application. That’s why it’s important to ensure that the optimal cloud resources are used to deliver the performance, reliability, and utilization needed to support an application workload.

Spot Elastigroup and Spot Ocean automate the provisioning, management, and scaling of AWS infrastructure while saving customers up to 90% on cloud compute costs. These savings are achieved by reliably managing spot instances for EC2 workloads and eliminating underutilized instances with container-driven autoscaling and advanced bin packing.

With Spot by NetApp, customers can run literally thousands of spot instances for core technologies without the need to touch any aspect of their deployments—the true definition of effortless management.

Optimize your AWS spend with Spot by NetApp

Learn more about how Spot by NetApp delivers visibility together with cost and infrastructure optimization to help you gain insights, optimize AWS costs, and manage your AWS environment for greater efficiency. Request a demo or check out our new white paper, How to operationalize and succeed in FinOps.