India’s leading logistics innovator optimizes containers and costs with Spot by NetApp

Introduction

Porter is one of India’s leading logistics companies providing a spectrum of intra-city and inter-city services. They faced a dual challenge: a lean DevOps team and soaring cloud cost. Seeking a solution, Porter embarked on a transformative journey with Spot by NetApp. This journey resulted in a significant impact to their FinOps strategy by optimizing container infrastructure, reducing cost, and streamlining operations.

Before implementing Spot, Porter’s FinOps practices were in their early stages. They were engaging in various cost management activities, including handling commitments utilizing AWS placement strategies such as instance spread and bin-packing, and employing a custom script for rebalancing the ECS tasks, all aimed at reducing infrastructure usage and cost. However, these efforts only addressed a portion of their overall consumption. Spot by NetApp marked a significant transition for Porter, propelling their FinOps into maturity.

“Thanks to Spot by NetApp, cost optimization is now built into how we scale and manage our underlying infrastructure. Naturally, these cost savings are invested back in the business.”

Jijo T. Joy, Senior DevOps Engineer at Porter

Optimizing container resources not only leads to cost savings but also enhances infrastructure efficiency, delivering substantial business benefits. By unifying cost optimization and infrastructure management, Porter empowered their DevOps teams to achieve greater productivity and minimize friction between DevOps and cloud operations. This holistic and continuous optimization approach enabled teams to streamline operations, enhance resource utilization, and drive overall performance while ensuring cost-effectiveness.

Challenge and opportunity

With just six members, Porter’s DevOps Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering team juggled multiple responsibilities, including maintaining all systems in production and several internal platforms. The team aimed to develop agile and innovative solutions for their platforms and core systems. However, due to constraints in personnel, time and resources achieving innovation proved to be challenging.

Additionally, unpredictable cloud costs hindered budgeting as the company scaled. Before establishing their cloud engineering team, Porter’s compute consumption primarily consisted of 70% On-Demand instances and 30% SPs managed by a billing partner. In this setting, Porter lacked the tooling to forecast usage peaks. To ensure a perfect user experience, Porter had to overprovision, which led to increased cloud expenditure.

Based on these two challenges, Porter saw an opportunity to streamline their operations by automating and optimizing their container infrastructure. “Autoscaling stateless applications on spot instances is a great way to preserve a lean infrastructure. Anyone with lean resources should tap into those. It requires some time investment – but if you do so through a trusted solution, this investment will have great impact as your cloud usage grows,” says Jijo.

Solution

Spot by NetApp’s Ocean is optimal for scale-up enterprises seeking to automate and optimize their Kubernetes, ECS and EKS infrastructures. This comprehensive solution provides AWS customers with a turn-key solution approach that prioritizes:

• Timely provisioning and scaling in an app-driven manner.
• Minimization of wasted and idle capacity by optimizing resource allocation.
• Reduction of infrastructure complexity by implementing Virtual Node Groups (VNGs) that allow multiple node types.
• Operationalization of EC2 spot instances to achieve more cost-efficient compute.

Porter exhibited a deliberate and measured approach in augmenting spot instance coverage within their Ocean Virtual Node Groups (VNGs).

“We never thought we’ll move 100% of prod to spot instances,” says Jijo. “During the proof of concept we tracked interruptions, latency, availability and other issues. With Ocean, we saw that even if interruptions did happen, our uptime was intact. This qualified for migrating our production clusters as well”.

Porter can now run 100% of their production environment on EC2 spot instances.

POC and partnership

During a 60-day Proof of Concept (POC), staging and production clusters were migrated to Ocean. The introduction of spot instance coverage led to a10-20% greater cost efficiency.

“When onboarding a third-party infrastructure solution, a good product and solid documentation are not enough. We need to see a strong backend team behind it. We expect proactive support for edge cases and custom requirements. Spot by NetApp knows how to deliver that. For example, we wanted to customize VNGs and needed support to create parameters in IaC. Ocean’s product team facilitated and later standardized that as part of the product.”

Jijo T. Joy, Senior DevOps Engineer at Porter

Porter was able to establish continuous optimization of their cloud container infrastructure across their AWS domestic and international accounts by utilizing Ocean’s bin packing feature.

Porter’s engineering and DevOps team leveraged a winning combination of Spot by NetApp, a robust consulting partner, and seamless AWS Marketplace fulfillment to unlock unprecedented cloud efficiency and scalability.

Business Impact

Spot Ocean’s integration has been pivotal in catalyzing Porter’s evolution from reactive cloud management to proactive cost optimization and innovation. “Ocean helped improve our overall infrastructure management. It introduced application-driven autoscaling instead of chronic overprovisioning,” says Jijo.

This transformation has unlocked unprecedented efficiency and scalability in Porter’s cloud operations. Spot by NetApp’s transformative power lies in its ability to drive not only cost optimization, but also scalability and innovation for forward-thinking enterprises like Porter.

“It gave us easy access to multiple instance types. Its logging and recommendations were of high value in understanding the bigger picture of our infrastructure consumption and costs. ECS service-level cost visibility is not directly available in AWS, but Spot Ocean provides that and it’s helpful for our cost attribution.”

As a result, Porter has achieved remarkable efficiency and scalability in its cloud operations, positioning itself as a leader in the industry.

Conclusion

Porter’s transformative journey to optimize container infrastructure and manage soaring cloud costs with Spot by NetApp exemplifies a shift towards mature cost optimization methodologies within their FinOps strategy. This journey was marked by deliberate steps, including a meticulous Proof of Concept (POC) phase and a strategic partnership. Through a combination of Spot by NetApp’s advanced capabilities, proactive support, and seamless integration, Porter realized unparalleled cloud efficiency and scalability extending beyond cost savings, fostering a culture of proactive infrastructure management and innovation within Porter’s engineering and DevOps team.