What We Learned at KubeCon 2022

It’s a wrap! From October 24–28, the Pepperdata team attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022, which brought together top engineers and developers from communities centered around Kubernetes and cloud native. With topics ranging from container observability practices to K8s innovations, Pepperdata unveiled the latest offering of its own: Autonomous FinOps for Kubernetes. 

From left to right: Kirk Lewis, Ruchi Garg, Ashish Sahu, Chai Patel, and Kimoon Kim

First things first: what is FinOps?

According to The FinOps Foundation, FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is a financial management discipline and practice designed to help enterprises maximize the cloud’s value to their business by enabling engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions. This is important because as more and more enterprises migrate their workloads to Kubernetes, many ITOps teams are finding that their cloud spend has skyrocketed. If the budget becomes skewed and uncontrollable, engineering teams must focus their thought energy on maintenance—thus stalling innovation. In turn, this puts a strain on finance teams that are looking to optimize revenue, and limits technology teams that cannot improve or create additional product lines. The collaboration between teams is ultimately halted due to the one primary problem: unpredictable cloud costs. 

Backwards to forwards approach for FinOps

4. High cloud costs

KubeCon 2022 showed us that companies, and especially ITOps teams, need to take a backwards approach in order for an enterprise to achieve a proper FinOps discipline. While powerful and dynamic, K8s requires constant management to make sure costs stay stable. As seen in our Kubernetes monitoring tools guide, nearly 70% of organizations saw their K8s spend increase between 2021–2022. We can list that as the primary problem, but how did a company get there?

3. Resource utilization

The 2022 Big Data on Kubernetes Report showed that allocation and reallocation of resources are large challenges that attribute to high cloud container costs. At KubeCon, we saw it firsthand with questions about our Capacity Optimizer such as, “does this tool show us info where the resources are wasted?” Not only does it show you where your cluster resources are being wasted, but it empowers your enterprise to utilize resources rather than simply reallocate them. Distributing resources based on utilization versus allocation means that you don’t need to overprovision, and thus your costs can stay under control. This is a major step towards achieving a true FinOps practice because engineering and finance teams can stay on the same page for a designated budget. 

2. Visibility

Not knowing where your resources and spend will create confusion on how to appropriately meet team SLAs. Pepperdata offers granular container-level visibility into an organization’s apps and workloads, providing a complete picture of that company’s Kubernetes environment. Before a Kubernetes practitioner can accurately utilize their resources, they need to have a detailed view of the infrastructure. The visibility provided by the Pepperdata product suite then enables engineering to view potential savings by accounts, workflows, and clusters—which in turn accelerates decision making.

1. Automatic remediation

With a tool to control costs, utilize provisioned resources, and view Kubernetes containers, it may seem that an enterprise can now truly achieve FinOps-level organization, except it’s missing one important component: Automation. Most FinOps tools can add the capabilities mentioned above, but an IT team will still need to manually tweak and perform tasks to optimize its infrastructure. Pepperdata’s automated remediation will run optimizers continuously and autonomously by analyzing container cost data and runtime behavior. Without any code changes or lists of suggestions, the platform can help enterprises achieve up to a 30% utilization increase. In turn, companies can enjoy 60% savings on their cloud bill. 

Step-by-step implementation to Autonomous FinOps

KubeCon 2022 brought us several insights, but the primary finding was why companies need Autonomous FinOps and how they can achieve it. Through a top-to-bottom approach, enterprises can enhance their operating model and optimize cloud costs through automatic remediation, container-level visibility, and utilizing the resources they already have provisioned. To see how your team can optimize your Kubernetes environment, try our demo or schedule a time to learn more about our Autonomous FinOps for Kubernetes platform.