As cloud growth continues to go through the roof, governance, optimization and putting guardrails are becoming burning issues.

Since automation is fundamental for optimization purposes, Spot by NetApp triggers the comprehension of the full cloud environment before applying this cutting-edge technology, according to Kevin McGrath (pictured), vice president of Spot by NetApp Inc.

“What are the things that I can do to optimize my environment, and how do I automate that?” McGrath asked. “We want to automate everything, because if you don’t automate, you’re never going to get to that cloud-native experience that you hoped to get to when you moved to the cloud. That’s really where you’ve got to go. If you’re not automating the decisions and the governance of what you want to do, you’re always going to be behind the curve.”

McGrath spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier in advance of the AWS “Savings in the Cloud” event, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why automation is at the heart of Spot by NetApp when it comes to cloud cost optimization. (* Disclosure below.)

Delving deeper into cloud cost optimization

Spot is geared toward making the lives of DevOps and platform engineers easier. This is realized through automation and providing the tools needed to carry out FinOps, governance, compliance and security, McGrath explained.

“We want to take care of your full cloud optimization, from your billing down through what you’re running in a container,” he stated. “We can also dig down into any of your workload solutions that are running in containers or on Kubernetes or anything like that, and we want to bring that full picture to you. Because we have the automation, we have the full visibility on our call structure from the cloud bill all the way down to the containers.”

Spot enables enterprises to maximize their ROI in the cloud. This is accomplished by optimizing the cloud infrastructure on which the applications run on so that the next dollar spent in the cloud goes further than the last one, according to McGrath.

“Spot’s all about cloud optimization in cloud operations and how we make you more efficient in the cloud,” he added. “We were acquired by NetApp three years ago.”

Even though the cloud enables businesses to move fast, the downside is that it’s very complex. As a result, the right tooling is needed, especially when it comes to cost optimization, because a consolidated view is needed. Spot helps with this objective, McGrath pointed out.

“You need to have the right tooling,” he stated. “Doesn’t really matter how you do it, but you need to have a plan on how you’re going to correlate all of these things together and understand your true cost to the cloud provider. To have a good tooling, and sometimes a big data solution even just to look at your billing … you need to bring in a vendor to get that done as well.”

As artificial intelligence continues to make airwaves, this cutting-edge technology is being embedded in almost every product. Nevertheless, these models require data, and Spot comes in handy in terms of storage integration, McGrath pointed out.

“You’re going to see a proliferation around everything AI. Even our customers, a ton of these legacy ETL workloads are turning into machine learning workflows,” he noted. “Machine learning models have matured so much over the past 10 to 20 years that it’s becoming more commonplace in any application that runs. And what’s the main thing that these models need? They need data; they need lots of data.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Kevin McGrath:

(* Disclosure: Spot by NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Spot nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE