Automation for Cloud Optimization

During the pandemic, many organizations sped up their move to the cloud — without fully understanding the costs, both human and financial, they would pay for the convenience and scalability of a digital transformation. “They really didn’t have a baseline,” said Mekka Williams, principal engineer, at Spot by NetApp, in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast. “And so the those first cloud bills, I'm sure were shocking, because you don't get a cloud bill, when you run on your on-premises environment, or even your private cloud, where you've already paid the cost for the infrastructure that you're using. What’s especially worrisome is that many of those costs are simply wasted, Williams said. “Most of the containerized applications running in Kubernetes clusters are running underutilized,” she said. “And anything that's underutilized in the cloud equates to waste. And if we want to be really lean and clean and use resources in a very efficient manner, we have to have really good cloud strategy in order to do that.” This episode of The New Stack Makers, hosted by Heather Joslyn, TNS features editor, focused on CloudOps, which in this case stands for “cloud operations.” (It can also stand for “cloud optimization,” but more about that later.) The conversation was sponsored by Spot by NetApp.