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Use Open-Source Kubecost to Understand (and Control) Kubernetes Spending

Many organizations deploying and quickly scaling Kubernetes struggle to understand how their cloud spend is actually, well, being spent. Precise visibility into which teams, projects, or applications are spending what amount on which infrastructure services is difficult to achieve. This black box of understanding has bigger implications, of course, as Kubernetes environments grow. 

(For more data on this problem, check out the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s recent – and first-ever – report into FinOps for Kubernetes.)

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How to Find an Optimal Set of Nodes for A Kubernetes Cluster

One of the most impactful ways to reduce spend on Kubernetes infrastructure is to make sure your clusters are optimally sized for the workloads they run. Working with many teams over the past year we have seen that it’s not so obvious how to arrive at an optimally-sized cluster, even in autoscaling environments. In response, we are publicly launching a new tool that we’ve used to help teams recently! While implementing this solution with users so far we’ve seen savings in the range of 25-60%, even having a major impact in autoscaling environments.

How It WorksPermalink

This new tool generates context-aware cluster sizing recommendations after analyzing Kubernetes metrics on historical workloads and cloud billing data. As a user, you only need to provide the context of the cluster, i.e. whether it is being used for development, production, or high-availability workloads. We then recommend cluster configurations, which optimize for the respective balance of cost, simplicity, and performance/headroom. Because this solution is Kubernetes native, we consider the following when providing recommendations:

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Setting Real-Time Cost Alerts in Kubernetes With Kubecost

Engineering teams can scale their Kubernetes costs and burn their budget with the same ease by which they scale their infrastructure. Thanks to Kubecost's real-time alerting, the risk of upsetting the finance team can be mitigated. Kubernetes is well-known for its ability to help scale applications rapidly and with ease, but this ability comes with some tradeoffs. Before Kubernetes, teams had to follow a more deliberate procurement approval process to change the capacity allocation. Today, that scaling process has been democratized, and teams can easily scale their clusters up or down.

With the ability to create more frequent changes to infrastructure resources come more opportunities to misallocate and over-allocate costly resources. In this model, technical teams can far exceed their expense budget without even realizing it, while financial managers would only notice it after the fact leading to avoidable organizational stress. So, how do you stay on top of your Kubernetes spending if your resources change daily?

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A Short Introduction to FinOps

As a part of our cost optimization series, we already talked about the most common AWS cost optimization challenges and the reasons why every company needs to solve this. In this article, we’re talking about FinOps as a way to optimize cloud costs.

To solve their cloud cost optimization problems, some companies develop FinOps practices. FinOps refers to Cloud Financial Management. It is the process of adding financial transparency to the cloud’s variable expenditure model. The goal is to empower teams to balance between speed, expense, and quality.

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Going to the Cloud With the Finance Team

Introduction

The intention of this article is to increase the awareness of financial aspects related to cloud operations as I believe that it doesn't get much attention, yet it is crucial to be successful in the cloud. I hope DevOps teams could use their financial knowledge to win the confidence of financial decision-makers so they can push their innovative ideas easily. Finance teams could play a lead role in making digital companies more successful and this area could lead to a whole new career path for them. I hope both domains will find some value in reading this article.

Background

Cloud computing has been the center of attention in today’s IT world. Gartner predicts cloud computing-related revenue would hit the $330 billion mark by 2022. In today’s digital world, cloud computing forms the nucleus of the business. However, perhaps due to the fact that much of the attention has been given to technical aspects, cloud finance has drawn less attention. However, as more and more enterprises are entering cloud space, experts have started discussions on the subject. If you consider the latest trends in cloud computing, most of them have close links to this subject.