Kubecost Adds SaaS Edition to Control Kubernetes Costs

Kubecost today announced limited availability of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of a Kubernetes cost management platform. The Kubecost Cloud platform is based on the open source OpenCost software originally developed by parent company Stackwatch.

Rob Faraj, founding partner and head of solutions engineering for Kubecost, says Kubecost Cloud will be initially made available via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to enable IT teams to rein in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) costs. As part of their existing AWS contract, IT teams can break down Amazon EKS costs resources by, for example, pods, nodes, namespaces and labels or other attributes based on their actual AWS bill rather than relying on estimates, he adds.

IT teams are also provided with customized recommendations for cost optimization based on their infrastructure environment and usage patterns within a single cluster.

OpenCost is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a sandbox-level project. Kubecost Cloud is expected to be made generally available in 2023. Previously, the company made available a curated edition of OpenCost that IT teams could deploy themselves. A SaaS edition, however, should make the cost control tool even more accessible to a wider range of IT organizations, says Faraj.

Following the downturn in the global economy, there is more pressure than ever to control IT costs. The primary issue organizations encounter in reining in cloud costs, however, has been a lack of visibility into those environments. In theory, of course, Kubernetes clusters that enable IT teams to dynamically manage the consumption of cloud resources should help reduce the total cost of IT. The challenge is that many organizations rely on developers to provision Kubernetes clusters, with each development team provisioning as much infrastructure as possible to ensure application availability and performance. As a result, the total cost of cloud-native application deployments can easily spin out of control, noted Faraj.

Of course, many enterprise IT organizations will have signed contracts with cloud service providers that guarantee discounted pricing if they run a certain number of workloads per month. However, many IT organizations prefer to continuously monitor pricing offered by multiple cloud service providers to reduce their overall costs. Regardless of approach, interest in reining in costs is on the rise as the percentage of workloads running on cloud platforms continues to steadily increase. In fact, some organizations are looking to rein in infrastructure costs to obviate the need to potentially lay off IT staff, says Faraj.

The one thing that is clear is that as the percentage of workloads running on Kubernetes clusters steadily increases, the more likely it becomes those platforms will be centrally managed by an IT operations team that must optimize the use of cloud infrastructure. Finance teams that are embracing FinOps best practices in the cloud era will then pressure those centralized IT teams to, at the very least, make sure Kubernetes costs become more predictable. Armed with those insights, it also becomes simpler for IT teams to consider which Kubernetes clusters they could consolidate.

Finance teams, of course, have been pressuring IT teams to rein in costs ever since the first data center was constructed. However, as IT environments have become more dynamic, achieving that goal has become more challenging in an era where the total monthly cost of IT remains unknown until the bill arrives at the end of the month.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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