To achieve cost savings using Kubernetes, culture and collaboration help bring together the necessary expertise.
To assist customers in controlling Enterprise Kubernetes Service (EKS) spending, AWS recently started to offer Kubecost, a third-party cost monitoring and management tool. This unusual move by AWS highlights how challenging Kubernetes cost management is for modern DevOps teams.
By namespace, deployment, service, cluster, pod, or organizational concepts like team, department, or application, firms can track the costs of resources with Kubecost. However, while cost visibility is an essential first step, it is not sufficient to bring these costs under control.
Here are some pointers to implement cost management procedures within the company:
The cost management principles
When it comes to cost management, there are some fundamental ideas. These principles do not involve number crunching, but they position organizations for cost management success.
Establish a culture of cost management
Cost management for Kubernetes is a challenging endeavor, much like cloud cost management. Companies must develop internal expertise in cost management, beginning by equipping developers and financial staff with the knowledge and resources needed. Kubernetes complements a cloud cost management initiative that organizations may already be working on in many ways.
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Coordination is the driving force
Any cost management success necessitates teamwork, particularly between engineering and finance. Cost optimization is typically not one of a developer’s core competencies. An accountant’s skill set won’t include Kubernetes either. The high cost of cloud services, particularly runaway container costs, will undoubtedly raise concerns from the accountant.
A cost management tool allows the development team to make quick changes to Kubernetes or container configurations to cut costs or support them in making a case for more funding.
A cost management tool can also act as a platform for communication between finance and developers.
Here is a basic cost management strategy framework.
Size the environment appropriately for FinOps
Environment right-sizing is a crucial cost-management tactic. It’s one where the quantity and variety of resources are appropriate for the roadmap an IT organization is trying to address with the cloud or containers. This setup necessitates careful resource management to control both the resources that are in use and available on standby for scaling and failover purposes. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) suggests focusing on FinOps at the pod level.
Utilize labels to track costs
By now, teams ought to be accustomed to using labels for cost tracking on their cloud projects. To distinguish Kubernetes objects and organize them into groups, they should use labels. The finance team can identify pod-level resource usage across various applications and environments by properly utilizing tags.
Include cost monitoring and alerting in daily operations
To avoid wasting money, companies want to provide developers with the tools and techniques to automatically detect and notify them of CPU and memory requests that exceed their current usage. The service quality monitoring the teams are already doing should be expanded upon by such monitoring and alerting.
By completing this work, much of the uncertainty surrounding cost management will be eliminated, and it will become just another automated reporting task.
Tools for cost management
Although the cost-saving claims made by the tools are significant, they don’t count on experiencing substantial cost savings right away. Cost management requires some learning. However, these tools can produce substantial savings over time by identifying inefficiencies, waste, and opportunities for cost reduction.
The cost management practices will develop and mature with the teams’ capacity to learn continuously, iterate, and automate all aspects of a DevOps culture. Making sure the developers can communicate with finance and other business stakeholders in a language everyone can understand will also help.
