Spot by NetApp Delivers Availability, Automation, and Cost Savings for Cloud Workloads With Microsoft Azure Spot Virtual Machines

NetApp, a global cloud-led, data-centric software company, announced the availability of Elastigroup for Microsoft Azure Spot Virtual Machines (VMs). NetApp recently acquired Spot, a leading cloud compute management and cost optimization company whose suite of tools includes Elastigroup.

Elastigroup from Spot by NetApp simplifies and automates compute infrastructure provisioning and autoscaling while allowing cloud consumers to dramatically reduce their compute spending by up to 90 percent, along with providing high availability. Elastigroup offers these benefits by reliably harnessing cloud providers’ excess compute capacity. Until now, Elastigroup supported Azure’s low-priority VMs, but now is offering full support of Azure Spot VMs. This support helps Azure customers enjoy dramatic cost savings coupled with the enterprise-level SLA of Spot by NetApp.

Elastigroup makes it easier to use multiple instance types and sizes within a single cluster for enhanced performance at scale. And built-in blue/green capabilities help customers perform easier upgrades of their clusters and continuous delivery pipelines.

“Until now, Microsoft Azure customers who wanted to use Spot VMs needed to choose workloads that were noncontinuous and not bound to specific time frames,” noted Amiram Shachar, vice president and general manager of Spot by NetApp. “Supporting Azure Spot VMs broadens NetApp’s collaboration with Microsoft Azure, building upon previous successes such as Azure NetApp^® Files, Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Azure, and Cloud Insights. We are looking forward to further strengthening our collaboration with Azure to the mutual benefit of all our customers.”

As a company, NetApp is focused on building innovative solutions around Azure products and services, such as Elastigroup for Azure Spot VMs and Azure NetApp Files.

“Elastigroup has been key to keeping our cloud infrastructure management at a minimum while significantly cutting our compute costs,” said Yoni Eini, CTO and co-founder, Upsolver. “As we increase our Azure footprint, Elastigroup will be our go-to solution for running a wide range of workloads on Azure Spot VMs.”

Benefits of Elastigroup

• Spot by NetApp offers an enterprise-level availability SLA for fault-sensitive workloads such as web applications, microservices running behind a load balancer or application gateway, high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, and Hadoop and Spark workloads.
• Seamless blending of optimal pricing options within a single cluster.
• Elastigroup offers automated fallback to Pay-As-You-Go and back to Spot VMs as appropriate.
• Heterogenous VM scaling for any VM type and size with Elastigroup automatically scaling the desired VMs without the need for creating an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set per instance type and size.
• Load balancers and application gateways are automatically updated to drain HTTP connections, and to register and deregister nodes as needed.
• For enhanced continuous delivery with hassle-free blue/green deployments, Elastigroup seamlessly replaces and upgrades application versions, ensuring an extra level of high availability for workloads.
• With cron-based scheduling, pay only for the resources needed, so teams can schedule on/off hours for their cloud compute infrastructure.