Episode 368 - Spot by NetApp: Elastigroup for your Spot VM Instances

This week on the Tech On Tap podcast, we tell you all about how to maximize your cost savings on your cloud BM instances without having your lift of finger using spot elastic. Welcome to the Tech On Tap podcast with Justin Parisi. I love NetApp.

Ho ho ho yeah. Get up! I love this company. Zipok! Zipok! I love NetApp because it's so funny. Hello, and welcome to the Second Tap podcast.

My name is Justin Parisi. I'm here in the basement of my house, and with me today I have a couple of special guests to talk to us about Spot as well as what it can do in the cloud, and specifically Spot Elastogroups.

To do that, we have Carl Gridley. So Carl, what do you do here at NetApp, and how do I reach you? I'm desperately stuck because I want to say something tremendously silly that would not enhance my career. I work very hard as a solutions architect in the spot part of

NetApp, working with customers, save money, drive automation, do all the kind of cool cloudy things that we do. All right. And if we wanted to reach you, how do we do that? You can reach me email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Signal, if you like your security, Telegram,

the old fashioned one, not the new one, anywhere you like. All right. Also with us today, we have Yarden Kassari. So Yarden, what do you do here at NetApp? And how do we reach you?

I'm a product manager here at SpotBanetApp. You can reach me on LinkedIn, Yarden Kassari, and on email, Yarden.Kassari, K-E-S-A-R-I, at NetApp.com. All right, excellent.

We're here to talk about Spot and Spot Elasti Group. But to do that, we like to talk about what Spot is before we get started, so you're not lost, right? Yarden, could you take that for us?

Sure. So Spot is a suite of products that is one stop show for cloud folks, for SRIs, for DevOps, for production engineers, Phenops, security guys that want to enhance the optimization

in the cloud and want to take one step further into most cost and security infrastructure environment on their existing cloud providers. but currently working with all major cloud vendors

that we will probably talk about AWS. We have support in Azure and in Google, mainly Spotify and Tana, if you wish, between the customer's environment

and the optimization it can get. We get the most optimization and cost infrastructure savings by doing smart decisions for him

and all the way to keep it secure and optimized. So what sort of similarities does this have to something like an Amazon Spot instance? Is there any sort of relationship with Spot

or is that just coincidental that that happened? Yeah, so the origin of Spot was to run your production, your compute production workloads, your mission critical workloads on top of Spot instances.

Spot instances, like you said, the access capacity of the cloud. So they have no SLA whatsoever in the cloud. The cloud vendor can take it away anytime.

So what Spot is doing here is it's running a machine learning algorithm behind NCCs to predict the interruption. So to predict the spot behavior,

the spot behavior in AWS again, in Azure and in Google, to predict those and to replace instances in advance to keep your compute workload optimized at any given time.

It has similarities to spot instances. The name is very much originated from that, but over the years, it's not just utilizing spot capacity to enhance the cost savings

on your environment. You have other products inside spot to make your workloads more secure, to manage your reservations,

to manage your containerized workloads. It's not just about spot instances. And the last group by design goes ahead and solves the issues that customers currently sees.

Yeah, we have things like Spot Connect and Spot Security. And of course we're talking about Spot Elasti Group today. Let's start to dive into that. So Carl, can you tell me a little bit about Spot Elasti Group

and how you leverage it in your day to day job? Sure. So Elasti Group is really the foundation for a lot of what we do. Elasti Group is the basis for some of the other products

like Ocean for Kubernetes. And that's the group is how we interface with cloud VMs, right? Instances, if it's AWS, VMs in Azure and Google. And it manages the way we spin them up.

We replace them if they're spot instances, we scale them if we're doing so for performance. And it's that engine that drives the heart of the work we do with the clouds.

Okay, so it's related to Kubernetes and containers and that sort of thing. So how does it enhance those types of workloads? What does it do?

So Elastigroup itself is interacting with the cloud, right? It's spinning up VMs, spinning up instances, managing the life cycle of those. Then on top of Elastigroup, you would have ocean that would talk to Kubernetes. Okay, so they work on Concord.

Exactly, yeah. So Elastigroup is the wheels, right? That's where you meet the road. This is what's interacting with the cloud vendor directly,

and then other products might use it. Or we might use it directly. For customers running VMs in the cloud, that's where you bring Elastigroup in for their VM level workloads.

Okay. something for VMs, you have something for containers. So you have all bases covered there for cloud workloads. You got it, exactly.

So they get to use the products in the right context with contextual extra value, depending on the workloads that they're running. So other than the interfaces

into these types of infrastructure, what would be the reason to have two separate applications to handle VMs and containers? Are there different considerations

when you're dealing with that in the cloud? Sure, I mean, another bit is keeping things simple, right? So when Spot came to build Ocean for Kubernetes, ElastiGroup was already there

and doing a whole bunch of fantastic things already. There was no point to reinvent it. The way it handles the provisioning of VMs, the lifecycle of a Spot instance,

the way it can talk about reserved instances and savings plans, the way it can do performance scaling. None of these things need to be invented again.

And if we're already working with VMs or instances, we go straight in with ElastiGroup.