Posted on

A Guide to Spot-Readiness in Kubernetes

Using spot nodes in your Kubernetes cluster can be intimidating due to their lack of availability guarantees. Kubecost’s Spot-Readiness Checklist is here to give you more confidence. The checklist investigates your public cloud Kubernetes workloads to identify candidates for safe scheduling on spot instance types, which can save you up to 90% on cloud resource costs. Kubecost automatically performs a series of checks on your AWS (EKS), Azure (AKS), and Google Cloud (GKE) clusters using your workload configurations to determine readiness. It then estimates the savings impact from making the transition to Spot.

What Are Spot Instances and Why Use Them?

Spot instances are spare compute instances that public cloud providers offer to customers at a deeply discounted rate—potentially up to 90% cheaper. However, spot nodes vary in their availability and pricing, depending on the supply and demand of compute resources at a given time and fluctuate per instance size, instance family, and deployment location. Once the demand for a particular instance type increases, spot instances may receive an interruption notice and spin down within a short shutdown window (usually a few minutes). For this reason, spot resources are best used for fault-tolerant and flexible applications like Spark/Hadoop nodes, microservices that can be replicated, etc.

Posted on

EC2 Instance Types: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A DevOps life isn’t a piece of cake in AWS. How are you supposed to make sense of EC2 instance types when you’re looking at almost 400 different ones? Picking the right VM type for the job that doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket is a challenge. But there are a few things you can do to make your life easier (and gain points with your financial department).

Careful choice of EC2 instances is definitely worth your time because compute is the biggest part of your cloud bill. If you manage to optimize it, you’ll open the doors to dramatic reductions in your cloud costs. 

Posted on

How Are Zoom, Spotify, etc Slashing Their Cloud Costs by Millions?

In Q1 2021, Zoom reported that its gross margin widened to 73.9% from 69.4% in the previous quarter, primarily thanks to the optimization of public cloud resources. And Zoom is certainly not the only company that realized the value of optimizing the cloud infrastructure. As businesses migrate their workloads to the cloud and build cloud-native applications, they’re starting to realize that overprovisioning and cloud sprawl aren’t just urban legends. 

For startups, the cloud is an essential technology because of its unparalleled support for scalability. But the cloud may quickly turn into a struggle because of growing costs. Here's what a16z wrote in a recent analysis:

Posted on

5 Costly Kubernetes Traps and Their Solutions

Cost management gets complicated fast in Kubernetes, and more businesses will face this problem soon. According to Gartner, 75% of companies will be running containerized applications in production by 2022.

If you use Kubernetes on AWS, you’re probably implementing best practices to reduce your bill already. To maximize your cloud cost savings, though, you need to understand the specific challenges Kubernetes poses in cost management and optimization. Read this article to find out what they are and how to handle them.