Managing Kubernetes on Azure at scale involves a lot of busy work, from chasing the latest AKS patch versions (a tedious, brainless task) to best-using reservations and savings plans (an inhumanly complex data challenge).
Spot Ocean for AKS is purpose-built to deliver efficiency at an enterprise scale. Now introducing intelligent commitment-aware autoscaling and auto-upgrades for AKS control plane patch versions, we’re taking low-touch Azure infrastructure management to the next level. Here’s a first peek at these powerful new additions.
Autoscaling on commitments: High performance at lower costs
Azure’s commitment-based pricing—Savings Plans and Reservations—can drastically lower compute costs. But fluctuating workloads often lead to underutilized commitments and wasted potential.
Ocean solves this challenge by dynamically optimizing resource usage in real-time, ensuring your purchased commitments are used wherever needed and possible. Here’s how:
1. Prioritized commitment usage
Ocean intelligently prioritizes your existing Azure commitments during scaling events, reducing reliance on on-demand or spot VMs. This helps you keep your cloud budget in check without compromising availability.
2. Real-time reversion
If Ocean launches a spot VM due to a lack of available commitments, it continuously monitors the environment and will automatically switch back to using your reserved capacity once available—ensuring optimal usage at all times.
3. Dynamic reallocation
Underutilized commitments in one workload (e.g., a Stateful instance group) can be reallocated to another (like an Ocean AKS cluster) where they’ll deliver more value. Spot’s platform identifies these opportunities and adjusts resource allocation dynamically.
4. Granular control for AKS
Spot Ocean offers fine-grained reservation usage control at the virtual node group (VNG) level, allowing teams to target specific workloads with commitments. This level of flexibility makes it easier to tailor resource allocation to your infrastructure strategy.
Spotlight: Real customer use case
Our customer is a mid-sized SaaS company working predominantly in Azure. Providing analytics solutions, many of its mission-critical workloads are stateful and fault-sensitive. That’s why it used Spot Ocean to run a combination of spot VMs and on-demand compute. With this new update, they seamlessly integrate their Azure Savings Plans across stateful VM and AKS environments. As a result, their on-demand consumption is near zero.
During a recent traffic surge amid a new product launch, Ocean automatically scaled out workloads using spot VMs to meet increased demand. Simultaneously, it identified underutilized Savings Plans and dynamically reassigned them to cover eligible on-demand workloads—cutting costs without requiring manual intervention.
Ocean then reverted workloads back to reservations once the traffic stabilized. This end-to-end automation saved the company time, improved resiliency and maximized the ROI on their Azure commitments.
AKS auto-upgrades
Keeping AKS clusters up to date is essential for ensuring security and performance. However, manually tracking and applying Kubernetes patch updates is tedious and error prone.
Ocean’s new auto-upgrade for AKS control plane patch versions takes the burden off your DevOps team by automatically detecting when a new patch is available. The auto-upgrade feature then applies it to your control plane and, optionally, your node infrastructure.
Ocean scans for patch versions every 24 hours and lets you decide between two methods for applying the upgrades:
- Control plane only—Update the patch version without affecting the nodes
- Control plane + node roll—Apply the patch and trigger a rolling update of virtual node groups (VNGs) using a safe blue-green deployment strategy
With support for pod disruption budgets (PDBs), customizable roll batch sizes and scheduled cluster rolls, Ocean ensures that upgrades are both safe and controlled. With the added bonuses of detailed logs and real-time visibility into progress, your team remains informed every step of the way.
Get started with smarter AKS management
With Spot, Azure users no longer need to choose between cost and performance. You can now have both while also greatly reducing operational overhead.
If you’re an existing customer and ready for your low-touch AKS future, log into your Spot console to activate these new automated features. Not a current customer? Simply schedule a demo to see how Spot can help you fully optimize your Azure environment.
