How to Track Kubernetes Costs: Challenges & 7 Best Practices
Introduction
Cloud services offer businesses great convenience, removing the hassle of on-premise infrastructure. But making the most of this on-demand access requires some experience and expertise. Companies will increase their spending and waste as they expand their cloud footprint.
One platform that has earned a reputation for running container-based apps across clouds is Kubernetes. Some of its evident benefits, like its open-source base, scalability, and portability, have resulted in its widespread adoption. According to a survey by Red Hat, 70% of IT leaders work for organizations that use Kubernetes.
While every company is keen on introducing containerization, it’s essential to account for the expenses that it can incur. Unmonitored spending can have dire consequences and disrupt an organization's financial planning.
This blog shares essential insights on monitoring Kubernetes costs, the FinOps model in Kubernetes, and the best practices to analyze Kubernetes spending.
Why is it Important for Businesses to Monitor Kubernetes Costs?
Computing can be virtualized using virtual machines (VMs) or containers. Each has its merits and demerits. VMs run on their operating system (OS), facilitating diverse computing on one physical server.
Contrary to this, containers function using the same OS but provide different user environments, making them suitable for homogeneous applications.
VMs are larger (often several gigabytes) as they have an OS. This makes them impractical for today’s evolving tech requirements. Subsequently, they’re slower, demanding more time to load the OS and its applications.
Containers, on the other hand, are measured in megabytes, which makes deploying and scaling applications easy. However, it presents its challenges and limitations. Businesses today deploy thousands of containers every day, and they need efficient methods to manage these instances.
Kubernetes (K8s) is a savior, the perfect container orchestration platform for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. It was developed to solve this problem and has become an industry standard, adopted by giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. However, it’s observed that K8s can make it difficult to track cloud costs and manage finances.
What are the Top 5 Challenges of Monitoring Kubernetes Costs?
Though K8s offers ample benefits, tracking costs presents a few challenges. Let’s explore these challenges in brief.
1. Aggressive Expansions
As businesses grow, they must increase their use of K8s to meet evolving needs. This enhancement in resource usage can result in high costs. Scaling apps requires additional resources. However, without thoughtful consideration, this step can result in overprovisioning (using more than needed).
This results in substantial spending on underutilized resources without contributing to organizational output.
2. Unpredictable Budgets
The dynamic nature of container orchestration can result in significant cost fluctuations. A rise in demand due to marketing campaigns, seasonal trends, or unexpected user surges can magnify resource utilization.
Such spikes are difficult to anticipate, resulting in poor budgeting and risk management. Subsequently, they introduce uncertainty regarding exercising control over finances and future planning.
3. Limited Cost Visibility
The layered and connected modern cloud architectures make gaining visibility into complete costs associated with K8s deployments cumbersome. Kubernetes clusters can contain stateless and stateful apps spread across multiple clusters requiring unique resources.
This, combined with additional third-party and legacy system costs, can further complicate cost calculation for each component. Without a comprehensive view of spending, it becomes difficult for businesses to identify cost-saving opportunities.
4. Managing Access to Cost Data
Security and compliance in different Kubernetes environments are complex, especially when managing access to cost metrics. Everyone, from developers to finance personnel, needs varying access to cost data to perform their operations well.
The platform needs robust control mechanisms to ensure sensitive data isn’t compromised. It’s also essential that each user has access to the correct information. Inefficient management of these permissions can either hinder operations or offer excessive access.
5. Idle Resource Management
With Kubernetes, many resources are allocated but not actively utilized in production. These resources add to your overall cloud spending and form a significant portion if not managed well.
Identifying these idle resources in the constantly changing K8s environment and application scaling is tricky. A lack of resource monitoring strategies can result in substantial spending on unused resources.
6 FinOps Best Practices for Cloud Cost Optimization
FinOps combines finance, operations, and cloud engineering to analyze cloud costs and optimize spending. FinOps strategies help businesses analyze their cloud spending and ensure efficient resource utilization, ensuring investments achieve their business goals. This approach makes way for sustainable growth in the cloud. Here are the top strategies that can be implemented to gain visibility into cloud costs.
1. Set Clear Financial Goals
One must observe a clear alignment between financial goals and business plans to obtain the best value from cloud investments. This includes defining KPIs like costs, revenue, and profits. By monitoring these KPIs on time, companies can make informed decisions, minimize spending, and enhance business growth.
2. Implement Cloud Optimization Practices
Leveraging cost-cutting practices can minimize cloud spending while maximizing value. Businesses can implement practices like rightsizing resources corresponding to requirements, saving reserved instances for predicted workloads, and spot instances for everyday tasks. In addition, startups can leverage autoscaling for evolving needs.
3. Perform Continuous Monitoring
Optimizing cloud costs demands constant monitoring of spending and performance metrics. This can be achieved by observing cost allocation tags, alerts for anomalies, and timely expense analysis.
4. Transition to Cloud-Native Technologies
Some perks of using cloud-native technologies are agility, scalability, and efficiency. For instance, serverless architecture reduces operational overhead, minimizes infrastructure costs, and offers expenses for consumed resources. Similarly, resource optimization and operation streamlining can be done using managed services and containerization.
5. Encourage Cloud Cost Awareness
Educating teams on best practices for cloud cost savings is imperative. This helps them make informed decisions that align with your financial goals. Businesses must assign ownership to teams or individuals with visibility into spending to foster accountability and cost-conscious behavior.
6. Strive for Improvement
One can become an expert instantly. However, organizations can drive sustainable growth with small and consistent efforts. Your FinOps strategy should incorporate feedback, learnings, and evolving business needs. To position your business for long-term cloud success, you must inculcate a culture of experimentation and innovation.
Top 7 Best Practices to Track Kubernetes Costs
It’s a fact that monitoring K8's costs is challenging. But here are some proven practices that can eventually help you exercise better control over your spending.
1. Resource Labeling
You might be familiar with resource tagging with the cloud. With Kubernetes, tags are replaced with labels. Finding and tracking resources later is much easier if you and your team perform resource labeling from the go.
Conducting this process smartly is essential, as it helps identify resources based on different parameters. However, this process only works with the participation of all team members. Poor or improper labeling can drive more confusion instead of clarity.
2. Using Monitoring Systems like Prometheus
Cost visualization can be done with help from monitoring systems like Prometheus. Detailed visualization can help analyze spending and manage resources effectively.
3. Leverage Autoscaling
Autoscaling is a top feature of K8s, facilitating efficient workload management. Here are the four main types of auto scalers that you can opt for.
- Horizontal Pod Autoscaler: An API resource and controller that automatically adjusts the replicas in the workload based on usage like CPU and memory.
- Vertical Pod Autoscaler: It isn’t pre-installed but can be found on GitHub. Post-installation, it facilitates CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs) that specify how and when to scale replicas in your workload.
- Event-Driven Autoscaler: It manages containers' scaling based on processed events.
- Cluster Autoscaler: Performs autoscaling at the cluster and node level.
It must be noted that making them work together is quite a challenge. It requires adjusting the settings based on one's needs while following various other best practices.
4. Selecting Appropriate Cloud Instances
Your selection of cloud instances directly impacts your K8s costs. Regardless of your chosen cloud provider, it’s important to match Kubernetes pods’ resources with allocated memory and computing power to avoid waste.
5. Efficient Resource Management
Cost savings and optimization can primarily be started by observing underutilized or unused resources. IT teams often opt to overuse resources, prioritizing performance over resource optimization. Yet, resources should be used wisely to avoid cutting something essential.
6. Hire a FinOps Manager
FinOps managers offer assistance in many ways. First, they can scrutinize technical teams' and overall cloud spending. Additionally, their daily monitoring of cloud costs ensures that resources are scaled only when needed, eliminating unnecessary expenses.
7. Using Specialized Tools
Using third-party Kubernetes tools can offer benefits like:
- Cost visibility
- Optimizing IT expenses
- Increase application performance
- Train engineers in cloud-saving process
Conclusion
Several reasons, such as cost efficiency, cloud agnostic, and scalability, have led to the worldwide adoption of Kubernetes. However, the platform also has certain drawbacks, primarily complexity with cloud cost management.
To mitigate risks with financial disruption, one can implement practices like:
- Introducing Visibility: Tracking metrics, reducing waste, assigning ownership, and optimizing costs efficiently.
- Understand Cost Optimization: Train team members to learn autoscaling mechanisms and other configurations for cloud spend reduction.
- Learning Kubernetes Costs: IT teams should develop a comprehensive understanding of tracking Kubernetes costs to improve productivity, ensure profitability, and introduce visibility in cloud spending.
- FinOps for Kubernetes: Apply FinOps principles to Kubernetes to enhance collaboration, cost savings, and long-term cloud optimization.
Following the above practices and insights, organizations can revamp their cost-saving strategies. However, learning, planning, and applying these best practices isn’t as easy as it appears in theory. Here’s where we can help.
Our extensive experience working with cloud and containerization platforms makes us experts. Businesses planning to optimize their spending can benefit significantly from our cloud consulting and cloud infrastructure management services. Get in touch with us today to gain comprehensive insights into your spending and make informed budgeting decisions.
