Kubernetes is now an essential tool for many organizations as they shift to cloud-native infrastructure, enabling flexibility and scalability in managing applications. With this flexibility comes complexity and also responsibility—particularly when it comes to Kubernetes cost management. As cloud costs take an increasingly large share of organizational budgets, leaders in DevOps and FinOps are focusing more than ever on optimizing their Kubernetes environments. Recently, I joined Dieter Matzion, Senior Cloud Governance Engineer at Roku and FinOps Ambassador, and Emilia A’Bell, Chief Revenue Officer at Platform9, for a webinar discussing how to master Kubernetes cost efficiency.
Eight years ago, when Kubernetes was still fairly new, most organizations were focused on getting their workloads running smoothly. Most early adopters were startups flush with venture capital and large-scale deployments were uncommon, so Kubernetes experts rarely discussed cost management. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Most organizations have tighter budgets and rely more on cloud infrastructure, making cost optimization a key focus for many organizations. As cloud expenses have become more apparent, organizations are realizing that the strategies they used to make Kubernetes more reliable can also help them to control costs.
FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.
- FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council (Updated December 2023)
The concept of FinOps grew out of a community need for cost optimization in the cloud. The term is a portmanteau of the two words Finance and DevOps (itself a combination of development and operations). The concept is to enable teams to manage cloud costs by taking ownership of their own cloud usage, supported by a central best practices group. Before FinOps, there were no standard guidelines for cloud cost management. In 2019, the FinOps Foundation was created to help organizations systematically approach cloud cost optimization. Now a part of the Linux Foundation, the FinOps community has grown to over 20,000 members.
The core framework of FinOps comprises two primary levers for cloud cost optimization: rate and usage optimization. Rate optimization focuses on securing the best prices for services, while usage optimization involves minimizing waste and inefficiency. Both are critical ways to maximize Kubernetes efficiency. The FinOps framework teaches people how to take advantage of these two levers. It documents them, makes the practice repeatable, and enables teams to measure performance internally and externally. It’s important to remember that FinOps isn’t just about technology, but also about embracing FinOps governance into the culture and structure of an organization.
Despite advancements in tooling and best practices, many organizations still struggle with Kubernetes inefficiencies. During the webinar, we ran a poll that revealed that many organizations are underutilizing their Kubernetes environments, with efficiency levels as low as 10% for CPU and memory usage.
One of the biggest culprits in terms of inefficiency is improper configuration of resource requests and limits for Kubernetes pods. Many teams set these requests when initially deploying a pod but fail to revisit them later on, leading to over-provisioned and un-optimized clusters. Tools, such as the Vertical Pod Autoscaler and KEDA (Kubernetes event-driven autoscaling) can help teams adjust resource limits dynamically and scale pods more effectively. Automating these processes ensures that your Kubernetes environment is running as efficiently as possible without requiring constant manual intervention.
While cost optimization is important, of course, teams must balance that with performance. Over-optimization can result in degraded performance, which can harm organizations long term, particularly if it impacts user and customer experience, leading them to seek alternative applications or services. Creating a healthy culture of collaboration between DevOps, FinOps, and Development is an important way to find the right balance between cost optimization and performance.
One strategy for achieving that balance is to build trust in automated optimization by testing cost optimization changes in non-production environments, such as QA or staging. Once the team sees the benefits of automated optimizations, they can be rolled out to production environments on a case-by-case basis. That’s especially important for engineers who want to maintain a strong record of having their containers running perfectly in production, because it will assure them that that record will remain intact. Another important way to test and prove automated optimizations is by ensuring that teams are using realistic load tests in non-production environments, otherwise you really won’t be testing the changes at production-level demand.
So, what can organizations do to improve Kubernetes efficiency? Here are some key takeaways from the webinar:
Watch the webinar to get more information: Mastering Kubernetes Efficiency: Proven strategies for DevOps and FinOps leaders
Many development teams struggle to prioritize optimization over building new features because they don’t have time to focus on both feature development and cost optimization. Embracing a FinOps culture can enable the buy-in needed from across the organization to find ways to prioritize cost optimization without putting other business initiatives at risk.
While leadership may not always see cloud cost as an issue, most get to a tipping point where the cloud spend is growing faster than revenue. By providing ways to gain visibility into costs, such as how much it costs to onboard a new customer to a SaaS solution, or how much a specific application costs to run, FinOps practices help organizations make informed decisions about where, when, and why to optimize.
If your organization wants to focus on building new products, not tuning resource allocations, Fairwinds Managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service can build, optimize, and manage your infrastructure.