CAST AI vs. Spot.io: Two approaches to automated cloud cost optimization
Tags: cloudnative, aws, kubernetes, googlecloud
Published: 2021-08-24 14:24:02

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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Automation is the best answer to controlling cloud costs, especially if you work with modern solutions like containers and Kubernetes.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But automated optimization solutions come in different forms: they focus on automating different cost-saving tactics and give you various levels of visibility and control.</span></p>
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<p><b>Here’s a comparison of two automation solutions available to teams that work with Kubernetes: CAST AI and Spot.io. Keep on reading to find out which one supports your use cases better.</b></p>
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<table style="width: 100%; height: 394px;">
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<td style="width: 50.5952%; height: 149px;">
<p><span style="font-size: 28px;"><b>CAST AI - Full-Service Cloud Native Platform</b></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 28px;"><b>Spot.io - Automated Spot Instance Use</b></span></p>
</td>
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<tr style="height: 245px;">
<td style="width: 50.5952%; height: 245px;">
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Created by industry veterans, CAST AI is a comprehensive cloud automation platform for <strong>optimizing Kubernetes</strong> environments. Companies across industries such as e-commerce and adtech are using CAST AI to <strong>save</strong> <strong>from 50% to even 90% on their cloud bills</strong>. Automation features include spot instances, autoscaling up &amp; down, and AI VM type selection.</span></p>
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<td style="width: 49.1667%; height: 245px;">
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Developed by NetApp, Spot.io is a cloud cost management solution that focuses on optimizing cloud infrastructure costs with spot instance automation. Using machine learning and analytics algorithms, Spot.io helps teams to get spot capacity for their workloads automatically, cutting costs and ensuring high availability.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">CAST AI vs. Spot.io - quick feature comparison</span></h2>
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<figure class="wp-block-table"><table><tbody><tr><td>
<p><b>Feature</b></p>
</td><td>
<p><b>CAST AI 🥇</b></p>
</td><td>
<p><b>Spot.io</b></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b>Supported platforms</b></p>
</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">AWS</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Google Cloud</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Microsoft Azure</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b>Cost visibility</b></p>
</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Detailed cluster cost breakdown&nbsp;</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Automated cost forecasting</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✖</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cost view across multi cloud</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✖</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Real-time alerting functionality</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✖ (coming soon)</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b>Kubernetes cost optimization and automation</b></p>
</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b><i>Rightsizing</i></b></p>
</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recommendations for instance types and sizes</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Automated rightsizing via AI-driven instance selection</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✖</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Multi-shape cluster construction</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✖</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b><i>Autoscaling</i></b></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Automated pod scaling parameters</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Horizontal pod autoscaling</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Node autoscaling</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cluster scheduling</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Automatic bin packing</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b>Spot Instance automation</b></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td></tr><tr><td>
<p><b>Full multi cloud optimization</b></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✅</span></p>
</td><td>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">✖</span></p>
</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>
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<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Detailed feature comparison of Spot.io and CAST AI</span></h2>
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<ol><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="#costvisibilityandmonitoring">Cost visibility and monitoring</a></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="#costoptimizationandautomation">Cost optimization and automation</a></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="#spotinstanceautomation">Spot instance automation</a></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="#fullmulticloudoptimization">Full multi cloud optimization</a></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="#security">Security</a></span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="#pricing">Pricing</a></span></li></ol>
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<h2 id="costvisibilityandmonitoring"><span style="font-weight: 400;">1. Cost visibility and monitoring</span></h2>
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<h3><strong>Cluster cost breakdown &amp; forecasting</strong></h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In </span><b>CAST AI</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">, you get a cost breakdown at the project, cluster, namespace, and deployment level. Teams can analyze costs down to individual microservices and then generate a detailed forecast of their cluster costs for better planning. CAST AI uses universal metrics that work with all supported cloud service providers.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The platform also comes with a cost allocation feature that works per cluster and per node. A feature for ongoing cloud cost reporting is also in the near-future pipeline since the CAST AI team plans to expand cost dimensions beyond compute - such as control plane, network, egress, storage, and others.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> breaks down the infrastructure costs of clusters and offers insights into each of the layers. Costs are broken down into namespaces and individual workloads within every namespace, with the option to filter them according to your container labels and annotations. For each workload, Spot.io displays compute and storage costs.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Users can use this data to analyze the application costs, perform chargebacks without extensive resource tagging, and estimate future cloud spend.</span></p>
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<h3><strong>Cost view across multi cloud</strong></h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Many companies use more than one cloud service today. Allocating costs in a multi cloud context is challenging, but </span><b>CAST AI</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> equips teams with insights for addressing that. Its full multi cloud functionality comes with visibility via universal metrics from Grafana and Kibana that can be used for any supported cloud service providers.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> currently doesn’t support multi cloud functionality or visibility across its solutions for containerized applications.</span></p>
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<h2 id="costoptimizationandautomation"><span style="font-weight: 400;">2. Cost optimization and automation</span></h2>
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<h3><strong>Rightsizing</strong></h3>
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<p><b>CAST AI </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">uses AI to choose the best instance types and sizes that meet an application’s requirements but still help teams save up on cloud costs. Whenever a cluster needs extra nodes, the AI-driven instance selection algorithm selects instances that achieve maximum performance at a minimum cost. Your team doesn’t have to lift a finger because it all happens automatically.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The platform also comes with multi-shape cluster construction, since choosing the same instance shape for every node in a cluster may easily lead to overprovisioning. That’s why CAST AI delivers an optimized mix of different instance types adapted to an application’s requirements.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">offers a handy Right Sizing recommendation mechanism. The tool monitors workload utilization in real-time to provide you with recommendations for adjusting the resource requirements of workloads when they start consuming significantly more or fewer resources than requested.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The solution provides recommendations per container and summarizes them for the entire workload to enable easier visualization at a high level and faster implementation.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<h3><strong>Autoscaling</strong></h3>
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<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Horizontal pod autoscaling and node autoscaling</span></h3>
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<p><b>CAST AI </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">automates pod scaling parameters to help teams avoid overprovisioning their infrastructures. The platform also includes a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, which uses business metrics to generate the optimal number of required pod instances. The feature then scales the replica count of your pods up and down, scaling to zero and removing all pods if there’s no work to be done.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CAST AI also ensures that the number of nodes in use matches the application’s requirements at all times, scaling nodes up and down automatically.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">continuously checks for unschedulable pods and if it finds one, it scales up to make sure that all the pods have a place to run. The solution also removes nodes automatically when all pods running on the node can be moved to other nodes in the cluster. To optimize costs, Spot.io prioritizes downscaling the least utilized nodes.</span></p>
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<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cluster scheduling and termination</span></h3>
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<p><b>CAST AI</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> automatically pauses and resumes clusters created within the platform to help teams avoid paying for resources they’re not using.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> makes sure that all that pods and nodes are terminated in a case of scale-down or instance replacement.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<h3><strong>Automatic bin packing&nbsp;</strong></h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kubernetes presents a cost challenge to teams because it distributes applications within a cluster evenly, with no attention paid to how cost-effective this setup is.</span></p>
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<p><b>CAST AI</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> changes the default pod scheduling behavior and uses automated bin-packing to achieve maximum savings in line with your settings. Fewer nodes translate to lower costs.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> uses bin-packing algorithms as well. When the tool identifies an instance where workloads may be distributed across the cluster, it triggers a scale-down to drain and terminate the instance.</span></p>
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<h2 id="spotinstanceautomation"><span style="font-weight: 400;">3. Spot instance automation</span></h2>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Spot Instances can result in dramatic savings of up to 90% off the On-Demand pricing. But there’s a catch - the cloud provider can pull the plug anytime. That’s why automation is so critical for effective spot instance use.</span></p>
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<p><b>CAST AI </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">makes sure that the replacement of spot instances that were interrupted is fully automated. This means that teams don’t have to worry about their workloads not finding a place to run. The platform is always on the lookout for better instance alternatives and provisions instances in a split-second to guarantee high availability.</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> allows users to run their clusters on spot instances without the need to provision or scale instances. The tool also takes care of bin packing containers on spot instances to optimize their use even further.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<h2 id="fullmulticloudoptimization"><span style="font-weight: 400;">4. Full multi cloud optimization</span></h2>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As more and more companies use multiple cloud services to access best-in-class services and prevent disasters, the need to monitor, manage, and optimize costs across providers is greater than ever.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CAST AI meets this need by offering you the option to set up multi cloud clusters using a number of </span><a href="https://cast.ai/disaster-prevention/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">multi cloud features</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">:</span></p>
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<ul><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Active-Active Multi Cloud</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - CAST AI replicates applications and data across multiple cloud services. If one fails, others keep your workloads afloat, guaranteeing business continuity.</span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Global Server Load Balancing</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - the platform distributes traffic evenly across all the participating clouds, always choosing the endpoints that are up and healthy.&nbsp;</span></li><li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><b>Multi cloud visibility</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - CAST AI makes cost allocation across cloud services easier thanks to universal metrics from Grafana and Kibana.</span></li></ul>
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<p><b>Spot.io </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">doesn’t support the multi cloud functionality at the moment.</span></p>
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<h2 id="security"><span style="font-weight: 400;">5. Security</span></h2>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Since both automation solutions work directly with the cloud infrastructure, their security is essential.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Created by cybersecurity experts, </span><b>CAST AI</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> offers a number of security features such as encryption at rest/in transit, secrets management, network security, logging, visibility, and more. The platform also comes with automatic patching and upgrades to VMs and Kubernetes to eliminate the chance of errors in your clusters. CAST AI doesn’t access any environment variables that are considered sensitive such as secrets, passwords, tokens, etc.</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">CAST AI is ISO-certified and well underway to obtaining SOC 2 certification.&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> encrypts account data within the browser and re-encrypts it with a secure algorithm when it reaches its servers. The tool doesn’t store any private keys, passwords, or authentication tokens - authentication is based on the IAM Cross Account Role &amp; External ID.</span></p>
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<h2 id="pricing"><span style="font-weight: 400;">6. Pricing</span></h2>
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<p><b>CAST AI</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> offers a free Savings report you can run to check whether you could save up on your cloud bill. The </span><a href="https://cast.ai/blog/how-does-the-read-only-cast-ai-agent-work-and-what-data-can-it-read/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">read-only agent</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> analyzes your setup and generates actionable recommendations. You can implement them manually or turn automated cost optimization features - in that case, you can choose between two plans: Growth and Enterprise. </span><b>CAST AI offers guaranteed savings of at least 50%.</b></p>
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<p><b>Spot.io</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> offers a free trial after which users can choose from two different pricing models: Pay-as-you-Go without the annual commitment and Subscription that comes with a commitment but opens the doors to more discounts and priority support.</span></p>
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<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Summary</span></h2>
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<p><b>Overall winner</b></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CAST AI</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Both Spot.io and CAST AI are great automation solutions for reducing cloud costs and facilitating processes like cost monitoring, management, and optimization.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><b>Using spot instances is a smart method for reducing the cloud bill, but it’s just part of the picture.</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">By</span><b> rightsizing other instances</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - for example, ones purchased within an AWS Savings Plan - you can drive your cloud bill down even more. </span><b>While</b> <b>Spot.io offers recommendations, CAST AI does the job for you via automated instance selection.</b></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The broad range of optimization features combined with automated cost forecasting and unique multi cloud functionality brings CAST AI to the top of cloud cost optimization platforms.</span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To accurately estimate the savings that you would be able t</span>o get - <a href="http://To accurately estimate the savings that you would be able t" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>start with the free AI Cluster Analyzer</strong></a>.</p>
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