Kubernetes cost management with Kubecost and SUSE Rancher

SUSE GUEST BLOG ARTICLE AUTHORED BY: Alex Thilen, Head of Business Development, Kubecost

Kubernetes and containerized workloads have become a de facto standard of the modern IT landscape, delivering unprecedented agility – on-premises, in the cloud, and across clouds. Managing resource costs in this dynamic environment can be challenging for organizations of any size. We’ve invited Kubecost, a SUSE One partner, to share some highlights of its approach and capabilities that enable SUSE Rancher customers to better manage their Kubernetes infrastructure costs. ~ Terry

A modern approach to infrastructure cost governance with Kubecost and SUSE Rancher

Over the last five years, we have witnessed an enormous number of companies across all industries migrate to Kubernetes and to the cloud native toolchain.  Adoption of the platform continues to accelerate.  According to a 2021 SlashData™ report with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, 5.6 million developers use Kubernetes today, representing a 63% increase over the previous year.  More than 70% of Fortune 100 companies now use Kubernetes, and every day new companies are running Kubernetes in production. 

Along with advantages of scale and resilience, this ecosystem brings new layers of complexity. Managing infrastructure costs in this dynamic environment can be challenging due to lack of visibility in Kubernetes project costs. Many organizations struggle to understand where their cloud spend is going and how to improve it.  Engineering and infrastructure teams all too often end up with a big bill at the end of the month—and occasionally a bit of heat from their colleagues in finance, too. 

Kubecost delivers unified, real-time, and accurate cost visibility and governance to SUSE Rancher users. 

Kubecost enables organizations with granular, real-time cost reporting across resources, departments, teams, and projects, making Kubernetes spend observable and trackable. Kubecost capabilities include: 

• Unified Cost Monitoring
  Gain unified cost visibility through the Kubecost UI or API endpoint to learn how much each team, application, and environment has consumed. 
• Cost Allocation
  Break down costs by any Kubernetes concept, including deployment, service, namespace label, and more for accurate “showbacks” and “chargebacks.”  
• Optimization Insights
  Get dynamic recommendations for reducing spend across your SUSE Rancher landscape without sacrificing performance.  
• Alerting & Reporting
  Get detailed reports and real-time alerting to quickly catch cost overruns and outage risks and to accelerate troubleshooting using granular data across clusters and clouds.  
• Governance & Compliance
  Continuously manage cloud posture and compliance with out-of-the-box policies for PCI, NIST, SOC2, etc. 

Kubecost and SUSE Rancher are both open source and cross-platform, leveraging the innovative power of many and maximizing flexibility. And workload data never needs to leave the Kubernetes cluster environment, enabling organizations to minimize security and data governance risks.

You can get started for free.  Easily install Kubecost from the SUSE Rancher Apps & Marketplace or install manually with a few simple steps. 

Take control of your cloud native environment with SUSE Rancher and Kubecost. 

Did you miss our SUSE One Partner Solutions Showcase webinar, “Monitor and Reduce K8s Costs with Kubecost and SUSE Rancher”?  You can access it on-demand. 

Additional resources:

• Kubecost Documentation 
• Rancher Documentation 
• Kubernetes Master Class: Kubernetes Cost Monitoring Strategies featuring Kubecost 

Alex Thilen is the Head of Business Development for Kubecost.  He is a former Category Lead at AWS, where he led the Containers & Kubernetes Category for AWS Marketplace. He lives in Seattle.

SUSE One Partner Solution Stacks, like Kubecost with SUSE Rancher, are featured innovations with SUSE and partner components.  We developed the SUSE One Partner Solution Stacks framework to make it even easier for SUSE and partners to collaborate on solutions that are designed to arm organizations with capabilities and agility to overcome challenges and accelerate success. 

The framework is open to all SUSE One Partner specializations and tiers.  We welcome opportunities to collaborate on new solutions or to enhance existing solutions with new capabilities.  Log into the SUSE One Partner Portal or speak with your SUSE One alliance manager for more information.