It All Starts in the Cloud – Spotlight on Our Rockstar Customers

In this blog post we’ll shine the spotlight on some of our amazing customers from around the globe who recently provided video testimonials about their experience simplifying cloud infrastructure management and lowering costs, with Spot. 

Armis – Keeping the Real World Secure

We often associate cyber threats with hackers stealing sensitive information from financial institutions or governmental databases and the like. But the truth is far scarier. With just about everything being “connected” these days, cyber security has a major role to play in keeping day-to-day activities running smoothly in all areas of life. Things like forklifts, HVAC systems, MRIs, elevators, oil rigs, security cameras, and traffic control equipment, all require protection from hackers. 

But these devices typically can’t handle traditional security software and as such were particularly vulnerable from cyber attacks, until now. 

Armis, founded in Tel Aviv, is the first agentless, completely passive cyber security platform for industrial and operational equipment of all kinds. Its unique technology discovers and profiles devices, analyzes their behavior to identify risks and attacks, and automatically protects against any unusual or malicious activity.

Running on AWS, Armis relies on Spot to keep their EC2 costs low while removing much of the infrastructure management that their DevOps and TechOps teams used to deal with. 

“The most important thing is that with Spot our DevOps team is happy,” shared Roi Amitay, Head of DevOps at Armis 

Chegg – Optimizing EC2 Costs, Helping Students Learn More For Less 

Chegg, based out of Silicon Valley, began their textbook rental business in 2005 for college students. Today, the publicly traded company has grown far beyond that, offering a broad selection of online learning and tutoring services to help their users with affordable, online tutoring for homework and other school projects. 

Using Spot, Chegg not only slashed their EC2 cost by leveraging spot instances, but was also able to recoup their investment in unused, but fully paid-for, reserved instances.

“Spot abstracts away all the nitty-gritty details of managing spot and reserved instances for ECS, with their support team and online resources providing us with in-depth ECS expertise,” described Steve Evans, VP Engineering at Chegg. He added, “When we want best practices and tips for standing up and managing ECS, Spot is our first call.”

Nissho Electronics – Driving Innovation in Japan and Beyond

Nissho Electronics, based in Tokyo, is a leading Japanese technology consultancy and system integrator that provides cutting-edge technologies to their customer base. We recently met with Nissho and their customer BTC Corporation to hear how Spot is helping Japanese companies reduce cloud cost and complexity. 

Yoshito Maki, a senior manager at Nissho, explained, “We’re happy to help our customers use Spot to reduce their cloud cost which directly increases their profits.”

Pollard Banknote – Giving You the Chance to Win

Pollard Banknote, based out of Winnipeg, started out as a printing company way back in 1907. In the 1970’s the company began printing lottery tickets for governments worldwide and more recently started developing and providing online gaming for mobile and web customers. 

Lead DevOps Engineer, at Pollard Banknote, Hoan Mac explained “we were looking for a way to manage our EKS operations and costs and have found that Spot saves us 70% as well as easily scaling our cluster up and down.”

https://youtu.be/SmzyLiU1OFM

TuneIn

TuneIn is headquartered in San Francisco and allows their customers to listen to their favorite radio station, podcasts, sports shows and other audio content from anywhere in the world. With a growing audience, the company runs their applications on AWS and for a couple of years were hesitant to use Spot or Reserved Instances due to concerns about stability and lock-in respectively. When they found Spot all that changed and TuneIn began using both Spot and reserved capacity to lower costs and simplify infrastructure management.

Ryan White, Senior Director of Operations at TuneIn shared that “Spot makes it very easy to drill down into costs we are incurring with our EKS workloads, down to the Namespace and Pod level”. He further explained how Spot makes it easy to do rightsizing, for example by showing “your Pod has requested more CPU and Memory than it actually is using”. He concluded, “Spot has allowed us to see where we can maximize our savings, so that as our services grow and scale, we can keep our spend fairly flat.”