4 Strategies for Kubernetes Cost Reduction
The economic volatility over the past few months has elevated cost reduction from merely a concern to being the primary DevOps KPI of 2023. Enterprises and digital native businesses alike are looking to reduce their compute budgets drastically and would prefer to do so without making tough decisions regarding their workforce.
Many of these businesses are embracing Kubernetes because it provides a powerful toolset for deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications. However, when Kubernetes environments aren’t carefully monitored and optimized, costs can quickly become burdensome and unwieldy.
Read on for four strategies that will help you reduce Kubernetes costs without compromising performance.
Make Your CSP Work For You
While it may seem counterintuitive, your CSP is motivated to reduce your costs. A satisfied customer is a loyal customer and nothing makes a customer more satisfied than cost-saving solutions.
Explore your CSP’s marketplace for Kubernetes cost-reduction solutions. Take advantage of your cloud provider’s discount options, such as reserved instances (RI), or negotiate with the provider to get the best enterprise discount plan (EDP) or other applicable savings plans.
If your Kubernetes applications are stateless, consider switching them to spot instances, which are significantly cheaper than on-demand instances. Use the Kubernetes WebUI to get more visibility into your storage. If you are using managed Kubernetes services such as EKS, GKE or AKS, you will have the option to tune that storage and reduce your costs even more.
Observability and Your Kubernetes Scheduling Strategy
In the immortal words of G.I. Joe, “Knowing is half the battle.” It becomes much easier to make cost optimization decisions when you know every element of your Kubernetes clusters inside and out.
Use observability tools such as Grafana and Prometheus to measure the number of pods and nodes and define the scheduling strategy based on the size of your cluster and running applications to maximize the usage of Kubernetes nodes.
Make Your Cluster Event-Driven
Kubernetes can be made more cost-effective by making it event-driven with KEDA. This ensures that scaling only happens when real events occur and the cluster is not affected by any third-party application or inefficiency of new containers.
Event-driven Kubernetes can help you save money by scaling only when needed, making your cluster more efficient.
Use Right-Sizing Solutions
One of the most significant issues with Kubernetes clusters is the over-provisioning rate, which effectively increases the number of used nodes of the Kubernetes cluster.
To ensure that CPU and memory utilization of the Kubernetes cluster are efficient and cost-effective, you can use right-sizing solutions at the node/pod level. This ensures that your K8s cluster is optimized for cost without sacrificing performance.
Reduce the pressure on your DevOps and developer teams by embracing autonomous capacity optimization solutions. This way, you can continuously orchestrate Kubernetes resources to fit your actual usage without tedious manual tuning.