Matthew Zeier knows the value of a well-designed software platform like Spot by NetApp. Deploying Spot Ocean at Lacework, the cloud-based security provider where Zeier works as senior director of production engineering & operations, led to a 20% increase in cluster utilization and cost efficiency.

Spot’s Ocean solution is a serverless engine for Kubernetes deployment across public clouds. Its core function is to help businesses rapidly deploy mission-critical workloads on an optimal blend of spot, reserved, and on-demand instances.

Lacework uses Ocean to manage more than 20 Kubernetes clusters running on some 300 EC2 instances. Ocean’s autoscaling feature is designed to run applications with an array of resource requirements on a blend of EC2 instances within a single cluster.

When he joined Lacework, Zeier stepped into a situation in which the DevOps team was struggling to keep up with spot instance interruptions and maintain cluster efficiencies. When they were successful, they maintained the status quo but had little time for other essential tasks. 

When they were unsuccessful, the consequences took the form of significant cluster inefficiencies. In some cases, pods were running on nodes that were far too large. In others, pods were not scheduled on time when nodes were too small for their needs. The result was wasted time and money for the Lacework team.

However, once Lacework implemented Ocean, positive results began to appear. Lacework was able to significantly reduce costs. Zeier and his DevOps team gained an intelligent automation platform that allowed them to turn their attention back to growing their business. 

“For me, the entire Spot Ocean narrative is about freeing DevOps from manual work. Any task is more important than managing Kubernetes and its underlying compute,” said Zeier. 

Spot also enables Zeier to help better manage Lacework’s tech-related finances. “Finally, I can have meaningful conversations with our engineers about what each and every pod actually costs in terms of compute and storage,” he enthused. 

Visit spot.io today to watch on-demand demos, start a free trial, or schedule a one-on-one session with a Spot by NetApp cloud expert.