Streamlining operations with automation from Spot by NetApp

The increased usage of containerization and virtual machines (VMs) in cloud infrastructure comes with its operational toll. Teams are preoccupied with complex and tedious tasks that prevent them from focusing on applications and architecture and driving the business value they can deliver. Organizations are seeking efficient solutions to optimize their cloud operations and enhance scalability. Automation is incredibly important for cloud infrastructure operations due to its ability to streamline, optimize, and enhance the management of cloud resources and services.

Spot by NetApp offers two powerful products which provide a range of cloud infrastructure management automation capabilities: Ocean for containers and Elastigroup for VMs. Let us explore six key automations they offer and how they can revolutionize your cloud infrastructure management.

Auto-healing to ensure high availability

This is one of the core automations provided by Spot by NetApp. This feature enables the automatic replacement of unhealthy nodes based on health checks from EC2, Kubernetes (K8s), or load balancers. By continuously monitoring the health of nodes, Spot by NetApp can swiftly identify and replace any degraded or failing instances, ensuring high availability and minimizing downtime.

Cluster Roll for seamless infrastructure updates

When it comes to maintaining a stable and up-to-date cluster, changes such as updates to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or user data can present operational challenges. Spot by NetApp’s cluster roll automation simplifies this process by facilitating a blue-green deployment approach. This means that new nodes are provisioned with the updated infrastructure, and once they are deemed healthy, the old nodes are replaced seamlessly. Learn more about Ocean’s Cluster Roll.

Dynamic AZ Selection to optimize workload placement

With this feature, customers can select a specific region, and Spot by NetApp will intelligently determine and allocate the group’s instances to the most available and cost-efficient zone within that region. This capability ensures that customers can optimize their workload placement by leveraging the benefits of different availability zones, such as enhanced fault tolerance and cost savings through spot instances. By automating the selection process, Elastigroup simplifies the management of instances and empowers customers to achieve the perfect balance between availability and cost efficiency in their cloud deployments.

Stateful Nodes to ensure critical application availability

Spot by NetApp’s Elastigroup supports stateful workloads by providing the ability to maintain volumes and network settings in case of interruptions. This automation ensures data persistence and minimizes the risk of data loss during scaling events or node replacements. Additionally, Elastigroup allows you to schedule specific shutdown times for your instances, providing flexibility and control over when your resources are active. Learn more about Elastigroup’s Stateful Nodes.

Scheduled operations out of the box to reduce DevOps work

Spot by NetApp understands the importance of optimizing costs and resource utilization. With the shutdown hours automation, you can easily define a cron expression to scale your Elastigroup, Ocean, or specific Virtual Node Group (VNG) to zero during off-peak hours. This feature allows you to reduce costs by avoiding unnecessary resource consumption when your applications are not actively used. Learn more about Ocean Shutdown Hours.

For Elastigroup, a shutdown script can be executed before the machine goes down, enabling graceful shutdowns and minimizing data loss. To handle peak hours – one could set up scheduled headroom in Ocean so that the infrastructure will scale up prior to the peak and scale back down once all the infrastructure is running.

Storage sizing and performance scaling to automate optimal resource allocation

This capability empowers users to effortlessly determine the disk size and required IOPS definition (coming soon), all based on the machine size they launch in either Elastigroup or Ocean. With sizing scaling, users can automatically set the appropriate disk size, ensuring optimal resource allocation, and eliminating the need for manual adjustments. Furthermore, performance scaling enables seamless adjustments to the volumes’ IOPS definitions to meet varying workload demands, guaranteeing smooth and efficient operations.

Streamline your cloud operations with Spot’s automated solutions

Automation is critical when it comes to managing cloud infrastructure effectively. Spot by NetApp’s Ocean for containers and Elastigroup for VMs offer a comprehensive set of automation features that streamline operations, enhance scalability, and optimize resource utilization. With Spot’s auto-healing, cluster roll, dynamic AZ selection, K8s version upgrades, shutdown hours, and stateful node management, organizations can achieve high availability, seamless updates, efficient scalability, enhanced security, cost optimization, and data persistence. By leveraging these powerful automation capabilities, you can focus on driving innovation and delivering exceptional experiences to your users without being burdened by manual infrastructure management tasks.

Learn more about how Spot Elastigroup and Ocean can help you automate your cloud infrastructure.