NetApp rolls out Spot services to Azure and Apache Spark

NetApp has released Spot Wave, a data management service for Apache Spark, and added Azure Kubernetes Service to the list that Spot Ocean – its Kubernetes-orchestrated container app deployment service – supports.

Spot and its containerised app deployment technology was acquired by NetApp in June last year. This enabled NetApp to offer containerised app deployment services based on seeking out the lowest cost or spot compute instances that met service level agreements.

Amiram Shachar.

Amiram Shachar, NetApp’s VP and GM for Spot, said in a statement: “The necessity for organisations to balance cloud infrastructure cost, performance and availability for optimal efficiency is complex and time-consuming. Spot Wave and Ocean are solving that problem by providing a serverless experience for Spark andensuring their infrastructure is continuously optimised.”

The Spot code or engine is said to be AI-based and it supplies the foundation of NetApp’s Spot Ocean, which supports Amazon Web Services ECS (Elastic Container Service) and EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) instances as well as the Google Kubernetes Engine. NetApp has now added support for Azure Kubernetes Service.

Spot Wave builds on and Spot Ocean to automate the deployment of Apache Spark big data applications on the Big Three clouds.

NetApp Spot Wave screenshot

Spot Wave automates the provisioning, deployment, autoscaling and optimisation of these Spark applications. There is no need for users to set up server instances in the cloud. Wave runs Spark jobs on these clouds’ containerised infrastructure using a mix of spot, on-demand and reserved instances, which can provide up to 90 per cent cost saving compared to only using on-demand instances. 

We are looking at a future where NetApp’s Astra data management suite for Kubernetes workloads, can help develop containerised apps and Spot runs them.