Spotinst launches budget serverless offering for containers

Spotinst has made a living finding budget resources on cloud platforms and reselling them to developers at a deep discount over cloud vendor retail pricing. Today, it announced a new budget serverless product for containerized workloads.

The new product called Ocean gives developers deploying containers a cheaper option. Much like any serverless product, you deploy your application and the cloud vendor determines the correct  resources to run it, but in this case Spotinst directs the workload to cheaper Spot, Reserved, and On-Demand instances.

Amazon offers a similar serverless container service called Fargate, but Spotinst co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar says there is a key difference between this and Ocean. “Ocean is 70-85% cheaper than Fargate, and is available on all cloud platforms, while Fargate is AWS-specific,” Shachar told TechCrunch. That ability to run on multiple clouds is also a key differentiator.

Spotinst takes advantage of excess capacity offered at a discount by all of the cloud vendors. The catch is these budget resources can go away when the cloud vendor needs them. To keep your application from shutting down in the middle of of an operation, Spotinst uses machine learning algorithms to understand when this is going to happen, shifting you to other available resources as needed on the fly.

“We are reusing our technology to reliably leverage excess cloud capacity in the backend and therefore are able to provide a much lower price for running these containers. It is transparent to the container and to the end user — the developer or DevOps. They simply deploy the containers, and infrastructure pops up only when they need it,” Shachar explained.

Up until recently, serverless was confined to event triggers using services like AWS Lambda, and Spotinst was on top of this trend last year when it released a similar discount service for event triggers.

The company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2015 and has raised over $56 million.