How software company Lacework freed their DevOps teams and reduced their public cloud costs (Guest blog from Spot By NetApp)
Author: Rajh Das, Head of International, Spot by NetApp
How fast-growing software company Lacework freed their DevOps teams, increased efficiency by 20% and reduced cloud costs
Founded as a start-up in 2014, software security specialist Lacework has grown exponentially over the last few years. Lacework’s solution relies on the ingestion and analysis of vast amounts of security log and activity data runs on Kubernetes clusters in AWS. Without meticulous and time-consuming DevOps management these clusters can be highly inefficient and prohibitively expensive.
Lacework’s management recognised the value of their skilled inhouse team. They knew they needed to enhance their DevOps productivity to remain ahead of the competition.
Cluster Inefficiency and Drained DevOps was hindering progress
When Matthew Zeier, Senior Director of Production Engineering & Operations at Lacework joined the company in 2020, their Kubernetes clusters were being manually managed by the DevOps team. This resulted in significant cluster inefficiencies with pods either running on nodes that were far too large for their resource requirements, or worse, pods not getting scheduled in a timely fashion where nodes were too small for their needs.
Additionally, Matthew was running the clusters on EC2 spot instances to keep costs low. Coupled with the manual scaling of nodes to match pod requirements, ensuring that the spot instance interruptions didn’t disrupt production environments was a major drain on the team’s time and a distraction from their core tasks.
The Lacework team no longer needs to deal with manual, time-consuming compute layer management.
Automated Optimization for Kubernetes Clusters was the answer
After seeing that the do-it-yourself approach for Kubernetes was unsustainable for Laceworks’s rapidly expanding business, Matthew chose Spot Ocean from Spot by NetApp as a turn-key solution for automating and optimizing their over 20 Kubernetes clusters running on some 300 EC2 instances.
Spot Ocean is a serverless engine for Kubernetes in the public cloud, empowering businesses to rapidly and reliably deploy mission-critical workloads on an optimal blend of spot, reserved and on-demand instances, without needing to worry about compute infrastructure management.
“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,” Matthew noted. He further explained, “Spot Ocean automates cluster optimization for us, rapidly scaling nodes up and down as needed and bin-packing the remaining pods. This increased our compute utilization and cost efficiency by 20%.”
Results and Benefits – Freedom to focus on delivering the best software
The Lacework team no longer needs to deal with manual, time-consuming compute layer management.
Spot Ocean’s Tetris-like autoscaling allows Lacework to run applications with very different resource requirements, on a heterogeneous blend of all available EC2 instances within a single cluster. Whenever there are underutilized nodes in any of Lacework’s clusters, Spot Ocean will proactively scale down the excess resources, when appropriate, and bin-pack the remaining pods onto other nodes delivering on average a 20% increase in cluster utilization and cost efficiency.
Furthermore, Spot Ocean’s predictive algorithms help ensure that Lacework can run their applications on highly affordable spot instances without worrying about workload interruptions.
When it comes to visibility into cluster spend Matthew enthused: “I love Spot Ocean’s cost analysis for Kubernetes. Finally, I can have meaningful conversations with our engineers about what each and every pod actually costs in terms of compute and storage. This granularity which goes down the level of namespace, resource, annotations and label, allows us not only to do proper cost allocation, but dig into and remedy any surprise costs.”
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Sue Daley
Sue Daley
Sue leads techUK's Technology and Innovation work.
This includes work programmes on cloud, data protection, data analytics, AI, digital ethics, Digital Identity and Internet of Things as well as emerging and transformative technologies and innovation policy. She has been recognised as one of the most influential people in UK tech by Computer Weekly's UKtech50 Longlist and in 2021 was inducted into the Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK Tech Hall of Fame. A key influencer in driving forward the data agenda in the UK Sue is co-chair of the UK government's National Data Strategy Forum. As well as being recognised in the UK's Big Data 100 and the Global Top 100 Data Visionaries for 2020 Sue has also been shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and was a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI. In addition to being a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security, Sue was recently a judge for the UK Tech 50 and is a regular judge of the annual UK Cloud Awards.
Prior to joining techUK in January 2015 Sue was responsible for Symantec's Government Relations in the UK and Ireland. She has spoken at events including the UK-China Internet Forum in Beijing, UN IGF and European RSA on issues ranging from data usage and privacy, cloud computing and online child safety. Before joining Symantec, Sue was senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Sue has an BA degree on History and American Studies from Leeds University and a Masters Degree on International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Birmingham. Sue is a keen sportswoman and in 2016 achieved a lifelong ambition to swim the English Channel.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- 020 7331 2055
- Twitter:
- @ChannelSwimSue,@ChannelSwimSue
Laura Foster
Laura Foster
Laura is techUK’s Associate Director for Technology and Innovation.
She supports the application and expansion of emerging technologies, including Quantum Computing, High-Performance Computing, AR/VR/XR and Edge technologies, across the UK. As part of this, she works alongside techUK members and UK Government to champion long-term and sustainable innovation policy that will ensure the UK is a pioneer in science and technology
Before joining techUK, Laura worked internationally as a conference researcher and producer covering enterprise adoption of emerging technologies. This included being part of the strategic team at London Tech Week.
Laura has a degree in History (BA Hons) from Durham University, focussing on regional social history. Outside of work she loves reading, travelling and supporting rugby team St. Helens, where she is from.
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- [email protected]
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- www.linkedin.com/in/lauraalicefoster
Authors
Rajh Das
Rajh Das is Spot by NetApp’s Head of International and has over 25 years of industry experience with large firms such as Google Cloud, Microsoft, and IBM through to hypergrowth cybersecurity SaaS companies. He has served SMB, Enterprise and Public Sector customers whilst building and leading operations and engineering teams.
