Monitoring Kubernetes Costs Just Got Easier: Introducing Kubecost 2.0
Kubernetes has rapidly become the container orchestration platform of choice, allowing companies to easily deploy and manage containerized applications at scale. However, as Kubernetes clusters grow larger and more complex, gaining visibility into resource utilization and cost has remained a persistent challenge. This lack of transparency makes it difficult for teams to optimize spending or allocate costs across business units accurately.
That’s why the release of Kubecost 2.0 is so exciting. Kubecost is an open-source Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization platform trusted by leading companies worldwide. With an intuitive UI and rich functionality, Kubecost makes it simple for teams to gain insights into cluster spend and improve efficiency.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the key capabilities delivered in Kubecost 2.0 and why this release is a game-changer for Kubernetes cost management.
Gain Granular Visibility into Pods and Containers
One of the most significant challenges with monitoring Kubernetes costs is attaining a pod-level view across clusters. Legacy tools provide only high-level overviews of spend per namespace, making it impossible to understand utilization at the workload level.
Kubecost 2.0 solves this problem by enabling teams to analyze spend for every pod and container in their fleet. Granular visibility down to the pod allows you to quickly spot inefficiencies, find waste, and optimize your deployments to reduce costs.
Some of the pod-level insights available include:
- Pod cost over time
- Pod CPU/memory requests vs. actual usage
- Which nodes are running each pod
- Whichpersistent volumes are attached
Whether running a single cluster or multiple clusters across hybrid environments, this pod-level transparency is invaluable for making informed decisions on optimization opportunities.
Allocate Team and Business Unit Spend Automatically
Another common frustration for Kubernetes users is accurately allocating shared cluster costs across different product teams or business units. This becomes increasingly complex as you scale your infrastructure and workloads.
Kubecost 2.0 introduces automatic cost allocation to solve this problem using label-based rules. Teams can instantly allocate pod expenses across multiple owners based on resource labels and annotations. Administration time goes down drastically while accuracy improves.
Some examples of auto-allocation scenarios now possible include:
- Allocate all “app=wordpress” pod costs to team A
- Allocate “env=prod” workloads to business unit B
- Split API server costs across 5 teams equally
This takes the grunt work out of manual allocation while empowering each team to view their allocated spend specific to their services. Understanding costs per delivering team is invaluable for accurate budgeting and reporting.
Right-size Deployments to Optimize Efficiency
In addition to monitoring costs, Kubecost 2.0 takes the next step towards helping teams save money by identifying right-sizing opportunities. Building on top of the granular utilization data, you can instantly spot deployments with overprovisioned resources per pod.
The right-sizing capability analyzes historical usage over the past 7 days to determine optimal CPU/memory allocations for each workload. The UI clearly shows which pods can be downsized safely to achieve better efficiency without compromising performance. Teams can validate recommendations through in-depth demand forecasts before optimizing.
Overprovisioning resources is one of the largest hidden cost drivers in Kubernetes. Kubecost 2.0 gives you an easy way to detect and eliminate waste, enabling savings between 20-60% on node costs. The easier it is to keep clusters lean, the more teams save month-over-month.
Model Public Cloud and On-Prem Costs Consistently
As Kubernetes usage grows across public clouds and private data centers, gaining consistency in cost views has become nearly impossible. Each environment reports pricing, utilization and allocation differently. This creates massive reporting overhead while making comparisons impossible.
Kubecost 2.0 introduces unified pricing and allocation models spanning all Kubernetes environments. Teams gain consistency whether running on AWS, Azure, GCP or prem environments including VMWare, OpenStack, bare metal and EKS anywhere.
Standardized functionality includes:
- Normalization of all spot, reserved and on-demand instance costs
- Cross-cloud margin models
- Unified labeling for auto-allocation cross environments
- Consistent right-sizing recommendations per workload
With consistent visibility into costs independent of environment, capacity planning, budget alerts and reporting all become exponentially easier. Kubecost 2.0 creates a seamless multi-cluster cost management experience.
Kubecost 2.0: A Must-Have for Cloud-Native Teams
The launch of Kubecost 2.0 marks a significant leap forward for Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization. Granular visibility, automated allocation and right-sizing give teams unprecedented ability to understand and improve spending efficiency. Compute costs often make up 70% or more of overall infrastructure budgets – making maximized efficiency in the Kubernetes layer critical.
For modern cloud-native teams running production Kubernetes clusters, Kubecost has become an essential component of the software delivery lifecycle. Much like monitoring for performance and logs, cost visibility and management must become ingrained into workflows. Kubecost 2.0 makes it seamless to control cloud waste through intuitive workflows for developers, platform engineers and FinOps teams alike.
To learn more and try Kubecost for yourself, visit www.kubecost.com or find it on GitHub. The ability to monitor, allocate and optimize Kubernetes spend is a must-have capability for any cloud-native stack. Especially as costs can easily spiral out of control, Kubecost empowers teams with timely visibility coupled with actionable recommendations – delivering ROI from month one.
