Monitor & Manage Kubernetes Costs with Ease Using these 6 products

The industry as a whole uses Kubernetes as its default tool for container management. The diverse features and convenience it provides, combined with the ability to easily scale and adapt to a range of diverse needs make it an extremely handy tool. Microservices-based products appreciate it in particular, utilizing it to provide additional value to users in a short amount of time.

Kubernetes empowers DevOps teams to focus solely on the development of new-age applications and features, leveraging disposable and replaceable resources at scale. However, these developments can lead to sub-optimal resource provisioning, leading to an unexpected increase in overall costs. 

Therefore, these benefits need to be balanced out with keen monitoring of the costs associated with Kubernetes. Often, the invoices one receives from cloud vendors only highlight line items for services such as AWS EC2 or EKS. This provides businesses with little to no information on actual workloads, making it difficult to manage growing costs. A survey conducted recently by  Cloud Native Computing Foundation highlighted the fact that over two-thirds of companies claimed that their Kubernetes-related costs had grown in the past year, with a fair number of them even seeing a jump of over 20%. There is clearly a need to monitor Kubernetes’ expenses while expanding on projects.

Metrics To Keep An Eye On

Before we highlight a few tools that would help you bring down your Kubernetes costs, there are a few metrics for you to keep an eye on:

Daily Cloud Spend

Keeping an eye on your daily cloud spend will help you ensure that your current cloud costs are in line with your budget. By keeping all possible data handy and accessible, you can compute your periodic expenses with ease. The first step in managing Kubernetes expenses can begin with the creation of your daily spending report.

Cost Per Provisioned and Requested CPU

Calculating the number of requested and provisioned CPUs can help you identify how much you’re spending per requested CPU in comparison to the CPU provisioned. This helps ensure that your cost-reporting efforts are far more accurate. 

While these may provide you with some initial measures, the following tools can help you maintain control over your Kubernetes expenses. Find the one that best suits your requirements and the variables you need to track.

1. Finout

Designed specifically keeping FinOps in mind, Findout is one of the newer Kubernetes cost monitors on the market. The tool uses Finout’s open-source cronjob to integrate into your Prometheus DB, offering you easy configuration and installation. You can also use your Datagod account API for this purpose.

Upon being integrated, Finout highlights various metrics such as cost per pod, deployment, namespace, cron job, StatefulSet, and cluster to you. These metrics are then used to provide you with granular cost visibility, thereby building on your AWS Billing data. This degree of cost visibility can help you specially allocate expenses on the basis of customer, tenant, team, or business application.

2. Cast.ai

Created to manage and autoscale Kubernetes clusters, Cast.ai acts as a cloud cost-optimization tool for your system. Along with real-time monitoring and autoscaling Kubernetes clusters, Cast.ai goes a step ahead by providing you with automated savings reports. 

Along with saving costs, Cast.ai also helps you monitor your containers for misconfiguration issues and any potential vulnerabilities.

3. KubeCost

KubeCost provides you with a handy offering that focuses on cost visibility and control. A cost monitoring and management tool, KubeCost provides an open-source solution that provides basic configuration and easy installation into clusters. 

KubeCost acts well to reveal the actual price of your Kubernetes resources such as pods or deployments. It is particularly beneficial for businesses looking to monitor Kubernetes costs in multi-cloud environments, like those built on AWS, GCP, and Azure.

4. Spot By Netapp

Spot By Netapp assures its users of up to 90% savings along with the elimination of manually managing infrastructure. It uses predictive analytics and automation to supply insights and advanced scaling for cloud infrastructure, thereby continuously optimizing cost and utilization of cloud compute resources. 

The tool stands out for its singular focus on the savings component of cloud cost management. The additional services it provides are often through the lens of cost savings, thus providing additional benefits wherever possible.

5. StormForge

StormForge is truly singular in its ability to merge enterprise-grade performance testing with machine learning. It therefore automatically identifies the optimal configurations for your applications, helping you maintain current performance while saving time and money. 

StormForge’s focus is on optimizing Kubernetes environments in order to reduce cloud costs making it an effective tool to automate Kubernetes resource monitoring and management. Its ability to juggle savings with improving performance empowers developers to work on innovating their applications rather than fixing Kubernetes errors.

6. Loft

Loft serves a rather unique purpose to help its users bring down Kubernetes costs. Loft’s Kubernetes platform provides truly unique features to manage resource costs for your enterprise. Two are worth mentioning here in particular – sleep mode and auto-delete. Both help you reduce Kubernetes expenses in their own manner.

Sleep mode contributes towards scaling down your lower environments by putting namespaces to sleep, along with purging the pods inside a namespace during inactive periods. Auto-delete, on the other hand, directly goes on to delete all those namespaces and virtual clusters that may be idle or unused for a period of time.

Which Tool Suits Your Needs Best?

Every offering mentioned here offers its share of advantages, niches, and shortcomings. It would be wise to first examine the nature of your requirements as well as the potential reasons behind your Kubernetes costs increasing. As new and exciting products enter the market, stay tuned on this platform for state-of-the-art tools that can help make your Kubernetes journey smoother and more affordable!