How Spotinst Helps Customers with Infrastructure Automation

Guest post by Amiram Shachar, Founder & CEO of Spotinst

As organizations around the world embrace the public cloud of AWS and leverage its vast benefits, the overhead and work of DevOps engineers are growing heavily. Developers use a wide range of infrastructure and platform services for deploying applications. Containers and Serverless are fast gaining traction and organizations understand that their cloud spending is sometimes suboptimal; they are constantly looking for ways to optimize their spend without any additional operational overhead. This problem is compounded by a severe talent shortage in the market.

Personally, I first observed this problem in mid-2015 when I was running the DevOps groups for a company called Ybrant Digital. We were in the middle of a huge migration to the AWS cloud and our agility and ability to go to market as a company has increased significantly. However, the cost had started to become an issue to my management. I was tasked with finding a creative solution to reduce our cloud bill, all while continuing our massive migration to the AWS cloud. That’s when I first got introduced to Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. I was quickly able to show great cost savings to my management. However, I had to place automation in place to protect our SLAs and platform’s availability. From that experience, I decided to found Spotinst, with the aim of relying on smart automation to save time and money for DevOps and organizations—increasing DevOps team’s efficiency exponentially and freeing them to concentrate on what’s next. We typically see that after first using the platform to automate work and save costs, customers will allocate the same budget or more to other AWS services, thus improving innovation and ROI for organizations.

Efficiency and availability on AWS by reliably leveraging EC2 Spot Instances

Spotinst’s flagship products, Elastigroup and Ocean, integrate with AWS core services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS to reduce operational overhead and infrastructure costs through automation and the intelligent use of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. Based on the historical and statistical data that we’ve collected, Spotinst’s Elastigroup predicts interruptions ahead of time and automatically migrates instances into different machine Types, Zones or falls back to On-Demand in order to ensure high availability and consistency. Spotinst Ocean lets developers reap the benefits of Kubernetes and Containers without worrying about infrastructure management while gaining deep cluster visibility and dramatically reducing costs.

A Natural Partnership between Spotinst and AWS, on Behalf of Our Customers

We are working together with AWS to offer solutions that benefit our common customers. This customer-centric collaboration allows AWS and Spotinst to provide faster service to customers and easier access to different pricing models through efficient orchestration of EC2 Instances.

For example, customers with advanced environments, such as Ticketmaster, use AWS and Spotinst to create an agile, easily managed, and cost-effective infrastructure. By using our platform to run Kubernetes clusters on EC2 Spot Instances, Ticketmaster was able to accelerate their AWS adoption while keeping costs down. Ticketmaster deploys large heterogeneous compute environments (built out of multiple instance families and sizes) for their k8s worker nodes to serve as their main infrastructure for various customer-facing multi-tier web applications. In order to manage that at scale, Ticketmaster uses Spotinst Elastigroup to manage these large clusters and balance between costs, performance, and maximum availability.

As you might have already figured out, we at Spotinst are always focused on delivering value to our customers and help DevOps use the AWS cloud in the most optimal way possible. We are rigorously working on new offering and features, that will benefit our customers in the area of DevOps & infrastructure automation. Can’t wait to the road ahead in 2019!