Kubecost Cloud Manages K8s Costs for FinOps Teams

When Kubecost’s two founders, Ajay Tripathy and Webb Brown, were working at Google on the then-internal tool, Borg, they kept running into the same challenge: How do you get users to care about cost?

They bet that when Google open sourced Borg (and became Kubernetes), its new adopters would face the same challenges. They were right.

FinOps Challenges for Kubernetes Users

In an interview with The New Stack, Kubecost’s Founding Partner Rob Faraj elaborated on the challenges Kubernetes (K8s) users face today: visibility, optimization, and internal governance. (For those of you who remember, the Kubecost folks were behind StackWatch, which Kubecost evolved from.)

Perhaps the most immediate concern for companies running multitenant clusters is visibility and what Faraj calls a lack of transparency: “At the end of the month, most K8s users are left thinking, ‘I’m getting a single cost, and now I have to figure out how to distribute it across my teams. But how much does a cluster cost? And what is the fair accurate share of the overall costs for a single K8s cluster?’”

Even as recently as three or four years ago, this was the chief obstacle for companies working with K8s. But that was before optimization became a priority.

Previously considered a nice-to-have, optimization and cost savings have now become must-haves in today’s macroeconomic climate, with companies seeking ways to reduce spending without sacrificing application performance.

Optimization becomes even more important in light of all the cloud spending that is wasted — a frightening 32%, per the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report.

This waste, Faraj says, “is the result of how easy it is to get things up and running in the cloud — and how difficult it is to then go back and audit your activity.”

These challenges with visibility and optimization have given rise to the new practice of proactive notifications and alerts on cost-related activities. Faraj says these simply didn’t exist years ago: “You didn’t inform an engineer that their resources were at or over budget. You would only alert them if their applications were down.” Though designed to help soothe visibility and optimization challenges, these and other FinOps strategies have introduced their own challenges for internal governance.

For example, historically, a cloud bill would arrive at the end of the month, and it would be the sole responsibility of the finance team. Only months later would reports of any issues actually make it back to the infrastructure team. Now, however, that process is changing, with infrastructure teams being pulled into regular discussions on cost savings and optimization.

Turns out, Tripathy and Brown were right: It’s not easy to create a culture of cost-awareness for tech users overnight. And outlining FinOps best practices to help teams monitor, manage, and optimize K8s-related cloud costs requires careful cross-team collaboration.

Bringing Engineers into the FinOps Conversation

Despite growing awareness of its many challenges, cloud optimization remains a stubborn obstacle for many teams. In fact, Flexera’s 2023 State of the Cloud Report names “optimizing existing use of the cloud” as a top initiative — for the seventh year in a row.

When asked why cloud optimization is such a continued struggle for companies, Faraj blames the approach of the industry’s most common tools: “Most tools take a top-down approach; they focus on the finance users and the CFOs. But there’s quite a bit of neglect to engineers who are ultimately the ones capable of implementing the changes to realize savings.”

Kubecost Cloud, on the other hand, he claims takes a different approach: “We’re about getting to the engineers first and giving them the information they need to make informed decisions in the interest of savings.”

Getting engineers to care, it seems, is at the crux of all FinOps challenges. After all, FinOps is, at its core, a cultural shift, focusing on best practices that empower finance and engineering teams to work together to maximize the value of every dollar spent on the cloud. Visibility, optimization, and internal governance challenges can’t be solved by simply pushing a new tool onto engineers. Instead, engineers need data that they can use to take action.

Kubecost Launches Kubecost Cloud

With the launch of Kubecost Cloud, Kubecost thinks they have the solution that both FinOps teams and FinOps engineers will like.

Kubecost Cloud is the SaaS version of Kubecost, a solution for monitoring, managing, and optimizing K8s spend at scale. It’s all built on Opencost, the open source, community-led specification and cost model.

Now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, Kubecost Cloud is supposed to help companies gain visibility into K8s-related cloud costs and, ultimately, reduce waste. For example, to help tackle workload rightsizing, which is identified as one of Google’s Four Golden Signals in their inaugural State of Kubernetes Cost Optimization Report, Kubecost Cloud gives users a clear picture of how many resources a workload requests versus how many it actually uses. Meanwhile, to support demand-based downscaling (another Golden Signal), the solution can also detect which workloads aren’t seeing a lot of use and when, like during weekends when most developers aren’t working. It then sends alerts to trigger these workloads to go offline — a worthwhile strategy for optimization, since cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) will charge you for compute capacity whether you use it or not.

These are just some of the ways Kubecost Cloud enables companies to act on the Four Golden Signals, which Google identifies as the signals top-performing FinOps teams dedicate their time.

Another notable benefit of Kubecost Cloud is its scalability. Because the solution doesn’t need to be deployed on all clusters at once, a company can start with just one, get billed only for what it uses, and then grow from there.

In the future, Faraj says Kubecost wants to continue helping users further grow and optimize by adding more automation to the SaaS solution. But he cautions: “Even as we push towards automation, we don’t ever want people to think that you can just turn on an autopilot button and then your job is done.”

Instead of striving for a fully automated, robo solution, Faraj says he’s more excited about the collaborative future of the FinOps industry — particularly, The FinOps Foundation, of which Kubecost is a certified platform and partner: “The FinOps Foundation is merging the traditional finance mindset with the folks whose hands are on the keyboard. And I love that marriage.”

But an easy marriage, it isn’t always. As finance teams and engineers come together to deploy FinOps strategies and optimize K8s-related costs, Kubecost Cloud hopes to be the solution that eases the union.