By Andy Kranjec

In early November, NetApp announced that it had acquired CloudCheckr, a cloud optimization platform that will extend our already robust FinOps offerings. Spot by NetApp has changed how public cloud users approach spot instances and CloudCheckr will enable our customers to further optimize their cloud use.

NetApp IT will benefit as well. We have begun our own due diligence on the platform to evaluate how we might use it to reduce our own cloud costs. This is of course very early in our evaluation process and we’re approaching this as any other potential CloudCheckr client would.

So, we’re light on what we know, but we have some things that we think.

On the surface, CloudCheckr is a cloud optimization platform that shows what’s driving your expenses. It identifies where you can avoid waste and make better purchase decisions. That drives down your overall costs.

Weeks into what will be a several-month evaluation process, we’ve found the platform to have extensive potential uses. It’s showing us where areas of opportunity are, in a lot of different ways. For example, it’s showing us what our idle resources are and identify high-cost resources that are not being utilized to their full potential. From there, it shows us what can be offloaded to a lower cost resource. It can be applied to a host of services, like elastic load balancers, provisioned IOPS storage , or reserved instances.

Exacts are stull fuzzy, but we feel that CloudCheckr will be a definite benefit to NetApp IT.

For our FinOps strategy, we’re going to feed the platform with data, deep dive into the recommendations it provides, and come up with sound metrics to justify decisions and show value to decision makers.

For our initial test, we connected it with CloudOne – our hybrid cloud environment – systems running on AWS, for which CloudCheckr has developed the most diverse feature set. It needs baseline historical data and knowledge of our own usage habits before it can make fully vetted recommendations.

This is all part of our wider FinOps strategy, which is designed to maximum the return on investment NetApp IT gets from its cloud spend. Our hybrid cloud environment is dependent on optimizing opex to reduce unnecessary spending. ClouCheckr, especially when combined with Spot by NetApp, has the potential of significantly changing this and empowering us to get the most power from the cloud for the least amount of funding.

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Andy Kranjec

Andy Kranjec is the Senior Manager for Infrastructure Operations for NetApp IT, overseeing the organization’s FinOps operations.