We are excited to announce a major expansion of Fairwinds Insights that shifts container rightsizing functionality left. That means that developers can now get accurate and actionable resource recommendations at the time of pull request. This extended support makes it far easier to eliminate wasted Kubernetes compute before it reaches production environments.
As many organizations that have already shifted infrastructure to take advantage of cloud native capabilities have discovered, Kubernetes can make it easier to increase deployment velocity. Unfortunately, that comes with risk: the inability to measure and reduce container costs easily. In ephemeral environments like containers and Kubernetes, it can be challenging to measure and track these costs. Often, DevOps teams find over-provisioned workloads deployed in production, wasting cloud spend because the workloads haven’t been rightsized. This can really mess up your cloud budgets!
You don’t actually need to have a tradeoff between speed and cost, though. Fairwinds Insights gives developers accurate rightsizing recommendations when they are making changes, so development teams can fix over-provisioned workloads faster. Shifting this information left in the software development lifecycle helps devs avoid unnecessary compute costs by providing increased visibility into the impact of any changes.
The Workload Cost Allocation functionality in Insights uses actual cloud spend data and data about your container usage to analyze historical costs incurred across multiple clusters, aggregations, and custom time periods. This enables Insights to provide immediate rightsizing recommendations. And because it also includes network traffic and disk usage attribution to provide a more complete picture of your application costs, helping you to better plan budgets and understand how to allocate costs.
As more workloads move to production environments, organizations really need a complete picture of their critical applications running on Kubernetes. Because Fairwinds Insights’ Cost Allocation expands beyond CPU and memory to also include network and disk costs, it allows the entire organization to get a far better understanding of the impact of Kubernetes workloads on their cloud consumption. In other words, platform engineers, DevOps teams, and finance teams not only get more information about what exactly the cloud costs are, but also about how to allocate them across teams and applications. This enables organizations to better understand and manage Kubernetes spending, making it easier to implement FinOps (if it’s not already in place). FinOps is the practice of identifying unit costs as it pertains to your cloud spend so you can pull the different silos in your organization together. In larger organizations, this helps you have ongoing conversations about cloud costs and make more informed business decisions.
There are several benefits your organization can realize by addressing container rightsizing at the pull request:
It can be challenging to manage your Kubernetes spending due to the ephemeral nature of the environments and ensure that your resources are allocated effectively across the platform. But it’s important to both understand and manage your costs, and be able to do it across multiple teams, workloads, and even clouds. Fairwinds Insights provides the functionality you need to manage not only your cost efficiency, but also security and reliability across your Kubernetes infrastructure. Insights provides guardrails to empower your dev, platform engineering, and finance teams to have the visibility they need to manage Kubernetes cost allocation at scale.
Interested in seeing Insights in action? Visit booth #G11 at KubeCon for a demo to learn how it can help you manage Kubernetes spending. If you are not at KubeCon, join our weekly demo to see it in action. You can also use our free tier, available for environments up to 20 nodes, two clusters, and one repo. (Not sure how to get started? Walk through the simple process of getting started with Fairwinds Insights.)
