Kubecost Adds Bevy of Tools to Better Control Kubernetes Costs

Kubecost today updated its namesake platform for managing Kubernetes costs to include a real-time cost estimation capability along with an ability to automate workflows to better control costs using a Kubecost Actions framework.

In addition, Kubecost 2.0 now includes tools that employ machine learning algorithms to improve forecasting along with an ability to detect anomalies indicative of overspending.

Finally, the latest release of Kubecost also adds unified reporting tools to better manage chargeback and showback processes across multiple IT environments and an ability to monitor networks.

Kubecost CEO Webb Brown said these capabilities will make it significantly easier for IT teams to embrace financial operations (FinOps) best practices across complicated Kubernetes environments. Many of these capabilities are enabled because the backend application programming interfaces (APIs) that Kubecost initially created have been revamped, said Brown.

FinOps is a discipline that promotes a shared responsibility for an organization’s cloud computing infrastructure and costs. Rather than having disparate procurement teams working in silos to identify and approve costs, business, financial and IT leaders establish policies and best practices for usage that are programmatically enforced. The FinOps Foundation, an arm of the Linux Foundation, has been defining a set of best FinOps practices, but many organizations still lack the discipline required to implement them. One of the major reasons organizations lack this discipline is that many of them have been allowing application developers to provision cloud resources themselves. It’s not until the bill comes due at the end of the month that finance teams realize there is an issue when there is a sudden spike in costs.

Kubecost is making a case for a dedicated platform for managing FinOps at a time when many organizations are forming specific teams to rein in IT costs by finding ways to rein them in programmatically. The challenge is many developers today will routinely overprovision Kubernetes clusters to ensure availability regardless of expense. Kubecost makes it simpler to identify, for example, opportunities to rightsize containers running on Kubernetes cluster to increase efficiency. The overall goal is to provide a more holistic approach to controlling costs across the entire Kubernetes environment, said Brown.

Of course, theoretically, one of the reasons IT organizations embrace Kubernetes is that it can make it easier to scale consumption of IT infrastructure resources up and down as needed. The challenge is that given the complexity of Kubernetes, many IT teams have not been able to achieve that goal. Kubecost, in effect, provides IT teams with a set of tools that make it simpler to control costs at a higher level of abstraction by consistently implementing controls.

It’s not clear how widely FinOps is being embraced, but given the ongoing amount of economic uncertainty, finance teams are clearly asking tougher questions about IT costs. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to proactively control those costs before they are incurred. After all, by the time those costs show up on a cloud bill, it’s already far too late to do anything meaningful about it.

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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