Finout

Apr 19, 2023

Cloud Native Now Finout today launched a suite of cost governance tools designed to help IT teams limit the cost of deploying Kubernetes clusters without deploying agent software. Finout CEO Roi Rav-Hon says the tools will enable organizations to programmatically embrace FinOps to reduce costs at a time when many organizations are now starting to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters in cloud computing environments. FinOps has emerged as a discipline that promotes a shared responsibility for an organization’s cloud computing infrastructure and costs. Rather than having disparate procurement teams working in silos to identify and approve costs, FinOps brings business, financial and IT teams together to establish best practices to reduce the total cost of deploying Kubernetes. The Finout suite of governance tools addresses that issue by analyzing an unlimited number of Kubernetes clusters running across Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other cloud platforms. The Finout tools use a unified dashboard to contextualize Kubernetes spending alongside all other cloud providers in a way that makes it easier to define budgets and track spending, noted Rav-Hon. The tools then apply machine learning algorithms and a virtual tagging capability to predict future spending based on past patterns and any anticipated changes to workload deployments, he adds. Finally, the Finout tools will also surface recommendations to reduce spending on Kubernetes and associated cloud services. The primary reason organizations overspend on Kubernetes is that developers tend to overprovision resources to ensure application uptime. In theory, of course, Kubernetes is designed to dynamically scale infrastructure up and down as required, but many developers tend to assume Kubernetes environments function much like any virtual machine, so they provision as much memory as possible and don’t take advantage of lower-cost cloud services to run workloads for a specified amount of time. Most organizations, despite this issue, will continue to allow developers to provision infrastructure to speed up application builds and deployments, but there is a clear need for FinOps tools and processes to rein in costs that can otherwise spiral out of control. The challenge is finding a way to streamline all the data that needs to be collected to enable IT teams to achieve that goal , said Rav-Hon. In an uncertain economy, IT organizations are now under more pressure than ever to rein in those costs. In addition to reducing costs, finance teams also want future cloud costs to become much more predictable instead of being surprised whenever there is a spike in how much the organization is being billed per month by their cloud service provider. Arguably, it’s now only a matter of time before cost control becomes just another metric used to evaluate the performance of any DevOps team. In the meantime, IT teams should expect to hear a lot more from finance teams, especially as they come to realize how much of the overall IT budget is consumed by workloads deployed in the cloud.