Carol Pereira and Corey Dinkens contributed to this blog post.
Managing costs in Kubernetes environments is an important business consideration for platform teams managing this infrastructure—especially if they are operating in one or more public clouds. Monitoring the cost of operating in the cloud and leveraging that data to optimize resource allocation and budget planning is essential to a business’s success in the cloud.
As seen in VMware’s latest State of Kubernetes report, 45 percent of software development and IT professionals surveyed are using more than one public cloud in order to reduce costs. More than three-quarters of respondents utilize multiple clouds primarily to reduce vendor dependency (53 percent), manage costs (45 percent), and expand disaster recovery and cloud backup options (42 percent).
Managing cloud native infrastructure costs in the public cloud can also help IT teams make the case for Kubernetes adoption itself. More than a third (37 percent) of the survey respondents claim that Kubernetes helps IT leadership show IT as a revenue driver, not just a cost center. But for that transparency to take place, cost visibility is key. Being able to see the total cost of clusters running on different public clouds in a centralized management tool might be exactly what platform engineering teams need.
To help platform teams understand costs while managing their applications, we are glad to announce that VMware is working to enhance its Kubernetes FinOps capabilities by bringing cost visibility to multi-cloud, multi-cluster environments with a new integration between VMware Tanzu CloudHealth and VMware Tanzu Mission Control.
View Kubernetes cluster costs for AWS cloud and Azure platforms
It can be particularly challenging for platform engineering teams to assess the cost of their Kubernetes clusters when operating in distributed environments including the public cloud. They must utilize multiple pricing tools from different vendors to aggregate costs from all environments in which they operate, and they must map the cost of shared resources to the business groups that incurred these costs. These tasks are especially difficult without dedicated FinOps software.
According to Chris Tozzi, a senior content editor and DevOps analyst at Fixate IO, using cloud-agnostic cost monitoring is a best practice because "each public cloud platform's cost monitoring tools work only with its own cloud, [and] third-party solutions are available that work across clouds. When used in conjunction with consistent workload labeling, these tools provide a way to track cloud spending and manage bills consistently."
Another interesting perspective was shared in this TechTarget article, where Brian Kirsch says, "What enterprises need is a cloud accountant. Although that role might not officially exist, a senior engineer or architect can take on this budgeting responsibility." Kirsch, an IT architect and instructor at the Milwaukee Area Technical College and part of the VMUG (VMware User Group) Board of Directors, goes on to say that, "Cloud accountants need communication and technical skills, as they likely have to explain cloud concepts to nontechnical people."
With this new, upcoming integration between Tanzu CloudHealth and Tanzu Mission Control, platform teams that have entitlements to both solutions will be able to see the fully loaded cost of their clusters in the Tanzu Mission Control GUI. The cost will be based upon information added to Tanzu CloudHealth related to their custom pricing with AWS cloud and Azure platforms. The widget will display both single cluster costs and the total cost of a cluster group to support teams in making informed decisions for their Kubernetes environments.
Displaying not only the cost of a single cluster but also the aggregated cost of cluster groups will reduce toil for platform teams when they are validating cloud spending with internal financial and cloud operations teams, especially those who still use Excel to track cloud spend, which represents 11 percent of respondents in the FinOps for Kubernetes survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the FinOps Foundation.
With both VMware Tanzu solutions, platform teams will be able to see the cost of their Kubernetes clusters directly in the Tanzu Mission Control GUI and quickly visualize which clusters are contributing to overall costs. This is true for both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters that are managed by or attached to Tanzu Mission Control. Platform teams will be able to make data-driven decisions about scaling up or down as needed to meet demand while controlling costs. Without proper cost monitoring and optimization, the platform can become inefficient and expensive to operate, leading to resource waste and budget overruns, so the data visibility planned for VMware Tanzu solutions will support platform teams with future resource planning and with optimizing the environment for future growth.
What's next?
Learn more about multi-cluster Kubernetes management on the Tanzu Mission Control product page.
Learn more about optimizing and controlling cloud spend with VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, and download a free copy of the FinOps book.
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