Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud can bring in extra revenue by selling off excess cloud capacity. However, while this extra capacity can be sold, in the event that a customer pays for full priced servers, companies that use the excess capacity will be kicked off. Cloud providers only give customers 2 minutes notice when that happens.
Naturally, such an unpredictable service must have a significant advantage and that is cost. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud sell the excess capacity at a significant discount. With the offer of an 80% discount, there are plenty of takers. However, not all companies can risk having their resources terminated with next to no notice, so therefore they end up paying top dollar.
Spotinst has developed a solution. Its platform allows companies to take advantage of the cost savings on offer from spot instances, while also eliminating the risk. The platform is able to predict interruptions and migrate applications to other empty servers, which are also being offered at a major discount. As a result, compute costs are saved without any disruption to services.
Now Spotinst has launched a brand new service: Spotinst Functions. Spotinst Functions represents the future of the cloud, offering users compute resources from anywhere in the world. The platform allows code to be run, without being tied to any one cloud provider. The service uses AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, along with regional offerings from smaller providers as well as the likes of Alibaba, IBM, and Equinix. Spotinst calls the new offering Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), which eliminates the hassle of having to deal with individual cloud companies as well as the risk typically associated with spot instances. The platform optimizes deployment to achieve cost savings and automatically migrates applications to empty servers with the best rates, performance, and reliability.
Users can select one cloud provider, several, or all to get the best possible rates. Compute & network resources can also be chosen based on geographical locations to minimize latency.
Spotinst can be viewed as the Uber of the cloud. Just as Uber owns no taxis, Spotinst doesn’t own any servers, yet it provides a cheaper and more reliable service. “We saw a great opportunity to get better rates on network and hardware, and we started to shift customers from AWS to other data centers that are close to AWS that leverage function as a service business,” said Spotinst founder and CEO, Amiram Shachar.
Unsurprisingly, the services offered by Spotinst have proven extremely popular. The firm started making profit after just 6 months in business and now more than 1,000 customers are saving up to 80% on their AWS EC2 compute costs and up to 84% on Azure VM costs.