{"id":3381,"date":"2022-01-17T21:35:20","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T21:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/17\/companies-could-be-wasting-80-of-their-kubernetes-spend-according-to-kubecost-ceo\/"},"modified":"2022-01-17T21:35:20","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T21:35:20","slug":"companies-could-be-wasting-80-of-their-kubernetes-spend-according-to-kubecost-ceo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/01\/17\/companies-could-be-wasting-80-of-their-kubernetes-spend-according-to-kubecost-ceo\/","title":{"rendered":"Companies could be wasting 80% of their Kubernetes spend, according to Kubecost CEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The very first version of Kubernetes launched in June 2015, and the open-source tool quickly became as essential to containers as containers are to cloud. Today,\u00a0approximately 75%<\/a> of organizations use Kubernetes in production, and adoption continues to rise.<\/p>\n

But life with Kubernetes isn\u2019t all hearts and flowers. Sixty-eight percent of users in the 2021 Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the FinOps Foundation survey \u201cInsufficient \u2013 or Nonexistent \u2013 Kubernetes Cost Monitoring Is Causing Overspend<\/a>,\u201d reported that their Kubernetes costs are increasing. The problem, as the report title suggests, is an inability to monitor costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbout two-thirds of teams can\u2019t answer where they are spending money \u2026 and when you can\u2019t answer that question, it\u2019s really hard to be efficient,\u201d said Webb Brown<\/a> (pictured), chief executive officer at Kubecost (from Stackwatch Inc.), an\u00a0open-source tool that gives developers visibility into Kubernetes spend.<\/p>\n

Brown spoke with David Nicholson<\/a>, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media\u2019s livestreaming studio, during a pre-event CUBE Conversation prior to next week\u2019s\u00a0AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations<\/a> event. They discussed the importance of Kubernetes cost management. (* Disclosure below.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Kubernetes adoption set to continue on an upward trajectory<\/h3>\n

Kubecost started in 2019 as an open-source project<\/a> created by a group of engineers working on infrastructure monitoring solutions at Google. This became the basis of Stackwatch\u2019s commercially available Kubecost<\/a>, which launched in March 2021. Today, Kubecost optimizes resources for over a thousand teams managing more than a billion dollars in Kubernetes-related spend.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, we like to see teams being more comfortable running their workloads in Kubernetes. That is <\/span>the ultimate sign of success,\u201d Brown stated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Engineers have been forced to pay attention to costs because continuous integration and continuous development cycles make it impractical to wait for the finance department to conduct cost analyses. This has created a \u201cshift left from a cost perspective\u201d as more and more engineering teams are monitoring costs in real-time, according to Brown.<\/p>\n

The abstractions and complexities that come with Kubernetes are the major factors driving demand for Kubecost, according to Brown.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Kubernetes, you can at any given moment have 50 applications running on a single node or a single [virtual machine]. You can fast forward five minutes and there could be 50 entirely new applications,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This means that simply assigning the VM or tagging it back to an application or team or department is no longer relevant in most situations, which makes tracking costs extremely complex.<\/p>\n

More complexity comes thanks to Kubernetes\u2019 ability to allow distributed engineering teams to work on many microservices concurrently. This is an essential function of the tool but means that there can be no centralized single point of decision-making, as decisions are distributed across not only the infrastructure team, but the engineering team as well, Brown explained.<\/p>\n

The third factor that has influenced the need for Kubecost is scale. According to the \u201c2021 Kubernetes Adoption<\/a>\u201d survey, 89% of respondents expect Kubernetes to play a larger role in the management of their infrastructure over the next two to three years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn entirely new ecosystem is being built around Kubernetes,\u201d Mark Potts<\/a>, managing director and global lead for Accenture\u2019s IBM and Red Hat alliance,\u00a0told theCUBE<\/a>\u00a0last summer. \u201cIt won\u2019t be \u2018born on the cloud.\u2019 It will be \u2018born on Kubernetes and run anywhere\u2019 in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

As adoption of Kubernetes continues to rise, the need for cost management will become more of a business-critical issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverywhere is where I see Kubernetes in 2022. Like very deep in the large and really complex enterprises,\u201d Brown stated.<\/p>\n

How to know if your company needs container cost management<\/h3>\n

To find out if companies need container cost management, Brown asks prospective clients what their cost efficiency is for all of their clusters. If they can\u2019t answer that question with a high degree of accuracy, (and the majority can\u2019t) then cost management measures are necessary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe regularly see teams start in the low 20% cost efficiency, meaning that approximately 80% is \u2018waste,\u2019\u201d Brown stated.<\/p>\n

Kubecost tracks costs in any environment where you can run Kubernetes, including on-premises, cloud and multicloud environments.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe give you visibility into all the resources that your Kubernetes clusters are consuming,\u201d Brown stated.<\/p>\n

Along with direct resources such as nodes, or load balancers, Kubecost can pull in external costs such as Kubernetes tenants that are using Amazon Simple Storage Service (or S3), Google Cloud SQL, or other external cloud services, as well as shared costs. Sometimes this can even include the cost of a DevOps team.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d give you the ability to allocate that back to your core infrastructure, which may be used for show-back or even chargeback across your organization,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n

Kubecost\u2019s superpower is its foundational layer of visibility that enables the solution to give visibility at any dimension in real-time with a very high degree of accuracy at the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world, according to Brown. This gives users the ability to have real-time monitoring and insights, set alerts and recurring reports, and automate input or data feed decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of these things are made possible because of the really hard work that we\u2019ve done to give this real-time visibility with a high degree of accuracy at crazy scale,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE\u2019s and theCUBE\u2019s coverage of the <\/span>AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations<\/span><\/a> event.<\/span> (* Disclosure: Kubecost sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Kubecost nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n