Organizations adopting Kubernetes to increase the speed of software development are consistently encountering the same problem—a steep cost to repair defects and configuration problems. Just as issues with code are expensive to repair, so too are Kubernetes misconfigurations.
On average, businesses are spending approximately 30-40 audit hours of engineering time per month, an intensive and time consuming effort. This work focuses primarily around identifying all pods and containers, entering misconfigurations into spreadsheets, and disseminating this information to developers for remediation.
The cost to fix Kubernetes misconfigurations does not have to be sky high. With Fairwinds Insights, our Kubernetes governance platform, organizations can shift configuration validation processes to earlier in the development life cycle, thereby bolstering security, optimizing performance and enabling developers to innovate and ship software faster.
Interested in learning how much money you can save with Insights? Get your own customized cost savings analysis by completing this registration form. Our team will provide a potential savings analysis for your business!
To see more clearly how Insights can save you time and money while avoiding risk, consider a DevOps engineer who makes $152,000 annually, a day rate of $576. At this scale, four engineering audit days per month comes out to $27,000 per year. As teams and Kubernetes clusters grow, that number is slated to increase significantly. If a team spends 10 engineering audit days every month, businesses could easily be spending (on the conservative side) about $69,000 to manually audit their Kubernetes every year.
The Insights platform addresses these cost concerns with productivity features, and over time, reduces manual efforts by engineering teams through the automation of manual tasks, including:
While many organizations claim to overprovision anywhere from 15-30% of their Kubernetes clusters, we know rightsizing your containerized workloads can dramatically reduce that number. For example, a customer of Fairwinds Insights, Decisio Health, was able to rightsize their number of nodes and databases per cluster. Glen Zangirolami, Principal DevOps Architect at Decisio Health, says it best, “ This understanding helped us reduce our cost per cluster by 25%. With 25 or more Kubernetes clusters in production, and growing, that cost savings is significant.”
Read our recent case study to find out how Decisio Health reduced their cost per cluster by 25% with Fairwinds Insights.
In more general terms, a team that spends $20,000 a year per for 10 clusters, and has overprovisioned said clusters by 20%, can save approximately $40,000 each year with Insights. And as Kubernetes clusters grow, so too does the savings Insights provides. More money in the pockets of businesses means more money to invest down the line.
Say a new CVE is announced. How does your organization handle auditing to ensure your Kubernetes infrastructure is not compromised? The truth is, teams spend three to five days a month (on average) auditing their Kubernetes clusters.
The Insights platform continuously monitors your clusters against security threats, so you don’t have to. When a new CVE comes on the radar, you can build a custom policy in Insights to understand more readily how (and if) your containers have been affected. Teams can spend upwards of $38,000 annually, across four engineering days, to audit 10 clusters against just 12 CVEs. Even though that number continues to grow alongside clusters and ever-present CVEs, Insights can reduce this cost and the risk of exposure through automation and reporting.
In general, the rule of thumb in cost-to-repair is 1:10:100. If a defect costs one dollar to fix, in both requirements and design, it will cost $10 to fix it in system or acceptance testing—and more than $100 to fix in production.
Saving significant time and money means investing in tools that enable your team to fix problems earlier in the development process. Teams who discover 80% of issues in staging, and 20% of issues in production, can find themselves spending more than $25,000 repairing just 20 high priority issues. Alternatively, with Fairwinds Insights, teams can reduce that spend a lot by fixing 89% of problems in development and 20% in staging. When issues are remedied before production, teams can save the majority of the cost to repair. With Insights, it is possible to save up to $100,000 or more annually.
Complete this registration form to receive your own customized cost savings analysis.Our team will reach out to provide more information on potential savings for your business.
Please note: The savings outlined in this article are only examples. For a detailed breakdown of potential cost savings, based on the unique use case and environment of your organization, please contact your Fairwinds sales representative or send us a message for more information.
