FinOps Series: FinOps for Kubernetes

Introduction

As more and more organizations are adopting cloud native ways to deliver services and migrate/run their workloads in Kubernetes, understanding costs, spends and optimization becomes important. It is particularly challenging in Kubernetes environments due to its complexity, dynamic nature of the running workloads, and abstraction over the infrastructure.

FinOps is a practice and culture for teams to manage their cloud costs. In FinOps model, everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage and costs and optimize it to the best.

In this article we will look at the challenges of applying FinOps principles to Kubernetes environments. We will also look at some of the best practices and recommendations for effective FinOps strategy.

Why FinOps for Kubernetes

Many organizations are now aware of FinOps practices and takes cloud cost monitoring and optimization seriously. The cloud providers provide necessary support in terms of itemized bill, using tags and labels to allocate and track costs etc. However, it is not uncommon to find out that Kubernetes environments costs are more than anticipated. This may be because of overprovisioning without understanding the baselines or could be because of lack of proper monitoring to track and optimize costs. Kubernetes environments are often shared between multiple teams and applications. Such shared resources, often create challenges with cost allocation and tracking.