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Spotinst on Saving Thousands by Running ScyllaDB on EC2 Spot

I am here with more great news from the upcoming ScyllaDB Summit 2017. I had a wonderful opportunity to speak with Amiram Shachar of Spotinst to learn more about his upcoming talk. Organizations are always trying to reduce infrastructure costs without sacrificing productivity and scalability and Amiram is going to tell us how to do that. Let’s dive into the interview and learn more about Amiram and Spotinst.

Please tell us about yourself and what you do at Spotinst?

I am the founder and CEO of Spotinst.

How did you get started in cloud computing?

I have served for seven years as an officer (captain) at the Israeli Defense Forces (Military) and I ran teams of datacenter architects and Linux kernel programmers. We have built our internal cloud infrastructure even before “cloud” was a cool buzzword.

Why did you start Spotinst and what problems are you solving in the cloud?

Spotinst started as part of an academic research by the founders of the company while they graduated their M.Sc in computer science.

What will you be talking about at ScyllaDB Summit 2017?

In my talk I will go over how people can save thousands of dollars by Running ScyllaDB on EC2 Spot Instances with Spotinst.

What type of audience will be interested in your talk?

CTOs, VP R&D, DevOps, and IT Managers should find my presentation very useful because I will provide them with cost-savings tips for their infrastructure.

Can you please tell me more about your talk?

ScyllaDB and Spotinst together provide a strong combination of extreme performance and cost reduction. In this talk we will present how a ScyllaDB cluster can be used on AWS’s EC2 Spot without losing consistency with the help of Spotinst prediction technology and advanced stateful features. We will show a live demo on how to run ScyllaDB on the Spotinst platform.

How are organizations using EC2 Spot now?

Due to the unpredictability associated with EC2 Spot instances, organizations were using it on workloads that are prepared for interruptions like batch processing, stateless applications, and stateless containers. Our predictive algorithm eliminates this uncertainty and hence organizations use EC2 Spot from our platform for a wide variety of applications ranging from Stateless Containers, Web applications, and even Stateful applications like Elasticsearch, ScyllaDB, Hadoop cluster, Single Server Database, and Kafka, etc.

Can you tell me a little bit more about Spotinst Predictive Technology?

The Spotinst prediction algorithm eliminates the risks and unpredictability associated with the Amazon EC2 Spot market. The algorithm places smart bid’s in the Spot market and tries to distribute the bids to the different market’s so that if any one of the markets is down, it won’t have any effect.

Spotinst has developed a unique Stateful application technology that allows enterprises to run both Web Applications and even more complex environments on EC2 Spot Instances. Using Spotinst Elastigroup, Enterprises are able to increase their overall elasticity and improve their performance while dramatically lowering their infrastructure costs. Using an advanced recovery technology, the system creates a clone of the previous EC2 instances and it will appear as if the instance was only restarted, achieving 100% data persistence. This unique solution has opened the door for many companies to start using Spot instances quickly, automatically and to save up to 80% on their EC2 costs for NoSQL and ScyllaDB clusters.

Where can we learn more information about your talk?

To learn more, I recommend the joint blog post that we did with ScyllaDB. The post describes how to save money by running ScyllaDB on EC2 Spot Instances and how ScyllaDB & Spotinst together provide a strong combination of extreme performance and cost reduction.

How can the people get in touch with you?

Twitter is the best social channel to get in touch with me.  There’s where I spend most of my time interacting with people.

Thank you very much, Amiram. We can not wait to see your talk in person and learn more.

ScyllaDB Summit is taking place in San Francisco, CA on October 24-25. Check out the current agenda on our website to learn about the rest of the talks—including technical talks from the ScyllaDB team, the ScyllaDB roadmap, and a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn how to get the most out of your ScyllaDB cluster.