It’s time to make your first big spend commit to the cloud of your choosing, or you’re getting ready to renew a commit and need all the details to get things right. Before you sign on a dotted line for loads of money, you want to make sure that the details of what you’re signing up for are right, and aligned to what you'll actually spend. There’s no discount for commit spend if you don't use it all. In fact, it ends up costing you more. So knowing WHAT to commit to matters.
To make your cloud or renewal commit as accurate as possible, you want to rightsize your instances, right size your workloads, and optimize your compute. Cloud spend is a significant cost for many organizations, and spending money unnecessarily is a poor choice for any organization. At the same time, it can be a real challenge to dig into the details of application resources and historical usage to make decisions. Most organizations have little visibility into the efficiency of their Kubernetes environment.
This lack of visibility makes it challenging to optimize your compute and workloads in a dynamic environment like Kubernetes. Multiple teams, multiple clusters, and a lot of complexity means that there’s a lot of information that you’re trying to review and evaluate to make the best decision possible.
That’s one of the reasons we created Goldilocks, which is an open source software tool from Fairwinds that helps you rightsize your workloads. We open sourced Goldilocks in October 2019 to provide a dashboard utility to identify a baseline for setting Kubernetes resource requests and limits. Goldilocks (obviously) helps you get those challenging settings "just right" — so you're bin-packing the right way. Goldilocks includes a VPA sub-chart that you can use to install both the VPA controller and the resources for it, which improves its ability to handle large clusters with hundreds of namespaces and VPA objects.
If you want even better and more fine-grained control, check out Fairwinds Insights. It provides multi-cluster visibility into your Kubernetes clusters, which helps you ensure that your applications are appropriately configured.
You can use Fairwinds Insights for free, forever. Get it here.
Fairwinds Insights leverages Goldilocks in addition to even more advanced logic (and advanced Prometheus metrics if you have them) to analyze and review your workload requests and limits. This additional visibility helps you to have confidence that you're committing to what makes the most sense for your business, so you’re not getting more (or less) than you need when signing up for or renewing your cloud commit.
Even after you've made your cloud commit for the next year and have set everything up the way you want it, a one time optimization is no substitute for ongoing monitoring of your Kubernetes environment. Make sure that you have the tools you need to enable your developers to regularly monitor those workloads. As an executive, with Fairwinds Insights you'll have insight into where your spend is going, and if it's being used in the best possible ways. Configuration and optimization are always important and should be an ongoing priority to ensure the scalability, reliability, resource efficiency, and security of your environments.
It takes great tooling to enable your team to have visibility into your Kubernetes environment. The right tools can help you rightsize your workloads, so your services are available but not over-provisioned. Accomplish what you need — without spending more money than you need to on cloud services, and make sure your cloud commit fits your needs and goals for the year ahead.