Why Kubernetes Can't Get Around FinOps – Cost Management Best Practice

The main theme of the conference presentation is the importance of FinOps in enabling data-driven decisions to save costs. The presentation focuses on monitoring, labeling, right-sizing, and waste management as key aspects of FinOps.

• Common understanding across roles is important in FinOps
• Standardization of labeling and monitoring is necessary across teams and organizations
• Load testing and iterative improvement of resource requests is crucial for right-sizing
• Integration and coordination of policies and autoscalers is important to avoid system failures
• FinOps can have a positive impact on the environment, but it is not the sole focus of the practice

The speaker shared a story of a project where engineers had set up the perfect configuration of autoscalers and weekend shutdown policies, but the clusters went down during the weekend and the operations team had to work overtime to fix the issue. This highlights the importance of integrating policies and autoscalers and ensuring that surrounding systems are not affected.

Anyone with the right permissions on a cloud provider can acquire resources or spin up Kubernetes Clusters. While developers can joyfully make cloud spending explode, traditional finance and procurement departments look around in wonder. The FinOps approach and the Foundation, which coined the word, dedicate itself to continuously enhancing best practices around cloud financial management. Managing Kubernetes resources is the masterclass of it. Having cost transparency and control over many dynamically scaling containers across many server instances can be difficult. Vanessa and Manuela share the experience in monitoring Kubernetes costs and planning budgets accordingly. This session covers how engineers – responsible for incurring costs – can support cloud cost management to prevent overspending and how this approach enables and empowers colleagues from finance, procurement and business in their daily doing. This, in turn, gives the engineer more freedom to explore new solutions.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!