NetApp announces Elastigroup for Azure Spot VMs

NetApp has announced Elastigroup for Microsoft Azure Spot Virtual Machines (VMs) is now available, aiding in businesses wanting to improve automation of computing infrastructure.

NetApp recently acquired Spot, a cloud compute management and cost optimisation company that has a suite of tools including Elastigroup.

Elastigroup from Spot by NetApp is designed to simplify and automate compute infrastructure provisioning and autoscaling while allowing cloud consumers to reduce their compute spending by up to 90%, along with providing high availability, the company states.

Elastigroup offers these benefits by reliably harnessing cloud providers' excess compute capacity.

Prior to this, Elastigroup supported Azure's low-priority VMs, but now is offering full support of Azure Spot VMs.

This can lead to cost savings, the company states, due to the fact that Elastigroup makes it easier to use multiple instance types and sizes within a single cluster for enhanced performance at scale.

Furthermore, built-in blue/green capabilities help customers perform upgrades of their clusters and continuous delivery pipelines.

According to the company, Spot by NetApp is also notable because it 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.

Furthermore, Elastigroup offers blending of optimal pricing options within a single cluster, automated fallback to pay as you go and back to Spot VMs as appropriate.

Using this software, load balancers and application gateways are automatically updated to drain HTTP connections, and to register and deregister nodes as needed.

Heterogenous VM scaling for any VM type and size with Elastigroup, automatically scales the desired VMs without the need for creating an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set per instance type and size.

For enhanced continuous delivery with blue/green deployments, Elastigroup replaces and upgrades application versions, ensuring an extra level of high availability for workloads.

Finally, with cron-based scheduling, pay only for the resources needed, so teams can schedule on/off hours for their cloud compute infrastructure.

Spot by NetApp vice president and general manager Amiram Shachar says, "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.

"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 states it is focused on building innovative solutions around Azure products and services, such as Elastigroup for Azure Spot VMs and Azure NetApp Files.