How Cutting Kubernetes Cost by 40% Can Transform Your Businesses

Table of Contents

Significance of Kubernetes Cost

Are Kubernetes cost blocking your way toward innovations and business success?

According to the report, 68% of businesses find managing Kubernetes difficult. Among them, 20% manage costs more or less constantly, and only 12% could lower their expenses.

So, why decreasing Kubernetes costs is a challenge?

Well, it is because of networking, storage, and multi-cloud provider. However, several organizations are still looking for a solution to reduce it.

We have solutions from which you can save 40% on Kubernetes cost by optimizing it. First, let’s understand what are managed and self-hosted Kubernetes.

An Overview of Managed Kubernetes

Managed Kubernetes, or Kubernetes as a service (KaaS), is a cloud-based solution that runs, operates, and deploys Kubernetes clusters. It is ideal when you want third-party services without relying on skilled personnel and training infrastructure.

It offers an uncomplicated deployment process, allowing businesses to leverage the power of managed Kubernetes clusters’. However, the pricing of managed Kubernetes is relatively high; let’s understand the primary factors behind the cost of managed Kubernetes.

Key Cost Factors of Managed Kubernetes

By considering these factors, businesses can easily understand the pricing behind the managed Kubernetes to make informed decisions:

✅ Infrastructure components: Servers, networking, and storage can be complex but required to run clusters.
✅ Management services: Proactive monitoring, security backups, and troubleshooting influence the cost to the support provider.
✅ Transferring data and storage: Data transfer, storage capacity, and snapshots are significant to managing Kubernetes.
✅ Resource allocations: The number of nodes, CPU, and memory resources are the primary reason for the cost of cloud-native applications.
✅ Service level agreement: Response time, provider availability, and service quality impact the associated cost of the services.

Benefits of Managed Kubernetes

Here’s how you can empower your business with the advantages of managed Kubernetes:

Cost Optimization

Managed Kubernetes offers cost optimization by eliminating additional infrastructure requirements. The service provider utilizes resources efficiently and allocates computing resources to the strategically situated ones, which reduces operational costs.

Improve Security and Compliance

K8s ensures applications are protected against vulnerabilities, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access and securing sensitive data. Also, managed services provide frequent security updates, access control, and encryption.

Streamline Deployment

It simplifies the deployment process by efficiently removing the complexity and managing Kubernetes clusters. It is easy to set up, but you can handle the Kubernetes environment without extensive expertise.

Agility and Scalability

By leveraging Kubernetes, businesses can adopt demand changes and accomplish operations efficiently. With agility and scalability, the workload is decreased by automating the process and accommodating to meet the need.

💡 Pro Tip- Managed Kubernetes is ideal for larger application

An Overview of Self-Hosted Kubernetes

Self-hosted Kubernetes signifies the deployment model with its own infrastructure and cloud environment. In self-hosted Kubernetes, you have complete control of the configuration, infrastructure, and setting of the Kubernetes cluster.

With self-hosted, businesses can tailor their Kubernetes environments, maintain security, integrate into existing infrastructure, and save costs through efficient resource allocation.

Key Cost Factors of Self-Hosted Kubernetes

By considering the following factors, you can understand the significant role of cost in self-hosted Kubernetes environments.

✅ Upgradation and maintenance: The self-hosted environment includes container runtimes, frequent updates, and fixing errors requiring Kubernetes software maintenance expenses.
✅ License and software cost: To operate, you will require a license for networking plugins, operating systems, and monitoring tools, which will cost high on your budget.
✅ Compliance and audit: You must follow standard regulations and security in the self-hosted cloud. Ensuring compliance may include additional costs for audits.
✅ Skilled development training: Self-hosted needs a skilled team to manage infrastructure efficiently, and their training costs will increase your budget.
✅ Hardware performance: Investing in excellent hardware has associated costs, such as processor, networking components, and optimal resource utilization.

Benefits of Self-Hosted Kubernetes

Here are numerous advantages of self-hosted Kubernetes:

Customization and Cost-Saving

Self-hosted services allow businesses to customize configuration and infrastructure as per their requirements. Also, organizations can save expenses with optimized resources by eliminating the additional overhead of managed Kubernetes cost.

On-premises Data Location

With their own infrastructure, self-hosted enable businesses to control data location. Thus, it ensures that data is protected against unauthorized access and manages data within the organization.

Performance Optimization

Self-hosted Kubernetes enhance performance with scalable components, direct control over networking configuration, and dynamic resource allocation. It can improve by configuring autoscaling rules based on metrics like CPU usage to meet workload demand.

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Flexible Infrastructure

The environment allows businesses to choose their hardware components, network equipment, cloud provider, and storage solution. Thus, it becomes easier to manage services as per the demand change and ensures the technology stack supports their unique needs.

💡 Pro Tip- Self-hosted is ideal for small and medium applications

Challenges of Kubernetes Cost Management

Along with the benefits, container orchestrators have a few challenges. Here are some challenges in Kubernetes cost management:

Complex Resource Allocation

There could be uncertainty regarding resource management because of fluctuating demand. For instance, over-provisioning results in unnecessary infrastructure costs, whereas under-provisioning leads to a waste of resources.

Various types of resources, such as storage and CPUs, have different pricing. Thus, it can save resources and money if managed and monitored.

Multi-Cloud Provider Service

The container orchestrators run on multiple clouds. As beneficial as it seems, managing cost in a multi-cloud service environment adds complexity. Because every provider has their pricing model, bill mechanism, and cost structures which are daunting to manage.

The intricacies of numerous cloud platforms involve data transfer costs and understanding different pricing tiers, making it a time-consuming and daunting task to compare prices.

Cost Monitoring

A lack of cost monitoring is equivalent to leaving money on the table. Fluctuating resource demands and various interconnected components make it arduous to track costs.

A Kubernetes cost monitoring system costs you around $0.10 per hour, and the need for using cost monitoring tools and real-time visibility adds complexity and leads to nowhere.

Lack of Visibility

A lack of visibility makes it difficult for business owners to identify the area of optimization and resources to be used. With no understanding of utilization, tracking and analyzing costs accurately can become a challenge.

As a result, there might be overrun costs, difficulties in budgets, and aligning costs with business objectives. Also, it may need help to pinpoint which resources are being underused or where there can be a potential saving.

5 Strategies to Enhance Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Follow these 5 strategies for Kubernetes cost optimization:

1 Minimize the Number of Servers

Optimize your Kubernetes infrastructure cost by reducing services in the environment. Businesses can determine the number of servers required to run their applications by evaluating workload and capacity requirements.

With a minimum number of servers, you can eliminate unnecessary expenses, decrease power consumption, and use resources efficiently.

Perk- Save up to 30% on hardware expenses and reduce the number of servers

2 Increase Autoscaling

By leveraging autoscaling; you can automatically adapt the number of nodes or pods based on workload demands. Use horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscale to autoscale and downscale container systems.

With autoscaling, you can ensure that there will be appropriate resources to manage loads without overspending or unused capacity, especially during low transmission. By implementing autoscaling, businesses can scale up resources for optimal performance and maintain efficiency.

Perk- Reduce 50% of cost by increasing autoscaling resources

3 Reduce Storage Space

Decreasing the storage space allocated to the Kubernetes cluster can reduce costs. By eliminating unused and redundant storage space, you can streamline your Kubernetes storage.

Also, it can be achieved by implementing data lifecycle and utilizing compression techniques to decrease the overall storage. Additionally, it helps to understand the data storage requirement and maintain data integrity.

Perk- Decrease 20% cost by minimizing Kubernetes storage space

4 Right-Sizing Resources

Optimize your resources by determining the accurate size that matches the requirements of your Kubernetes workloads. You can avoid underutilized and overutilized resources by implementing the right-sizing resources.

With performance monitoring and capacity planning, businesses can allocate the relevant memory resources and several CPU storages to optimal performance and utilization. It is cost-effective and allows us to achieve price efficiency without compromising performance.

Perk- Save cost up to 40% by leveraging right-sizing resources

5 Monitoring and Analysis

Gain visibility into cost allocation, resource utilization, and performance metrics using robust monitoring tools and analyzing the practices. With monitoring and analysis, you can identify areas of inefficiency and take measures to optimize costs.

By implementing monitoring and analysis tools, you can acquire cost trends and usage patterns that help to improve the cost. Also, continuously monitoring and analyzing can ensure maximum cost efficiency.

Perk- Reduce access cloud spending by 35% with monitoring

Table of Kubernetes Costs in AWS EKs, Azure, GKE, and DOKS

Following are the costs of different costs in Kubernetes:

Kubernetes Cost Calculator:

1. AWS Kubernetes Cost Calculator

• Cost to run one cluster- $876
• Cost of workers nodes- $2376
• Cost of dedicated DevOps- $3000

Total= $6252

2. Azure Kubernetes Cost Calculator

• Cost to run one cluster- $876
• Cost of workers nodes- $2523
• Cost of dedicated DevOps- $2500

Total= $5895

3. GKE Cost Calculator

• Cost to run one cluster- $800
• Cost of workers nodes- $74.40
• Cost of dedicated DevOps- $4200

Total= $5074

4. DigitalOcean Kubernetes Cost Calculator

• Cost to run one cluster- $850
• Cost of workers nodes- $360
• Cost of dedicated DevOps- $3000

Total= $4210

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Kubernetes Cost Optimization Case Study

Let’s look at how Pinterest, a prominent social media web, optimizes Kubernetes costs and enhances its performance by implementing it.

Pinterest is a social media web that allows users to discover, pin, share, or save visual content, such as images and videos. It is a virtual pin board with multiple topics, including travel, fashion, DIY projects, and much more.

Pinterest has been utilizing cloud service since its first day. It has a massive fleet of servers and over 300 petabytes of data. After becoming popular, it started facing issues in managing virtual machines. Since then, it has moved to Kubernetes for better performance.

Challenges

After 8 years of launching, Pinterest had upscaled to 1,000 microservices and various infrastructure layers and expanded platforms and set-up tools. In 2016, they started a new computing platform with the underlying infrastructure.

However, it led to an increased volume of the infrastructure stack, and the team faced challenges, such as a massive workload and handling many virtual machines. As a result, loss of expenses and overused resources.

Solutions

Initially, the Pinterest team shifted from the EC2 instance to the Docker container. But later, they were looking at orchestration to help create efficiencies. Hence, they move to Kubernetes to identify patterns and heal containers.

Also, with the right resource allocation and strategies, it cuts overhead costs and robust infrastructure.

Impact

“By shifting to Kubernetes, the team created on-demand scaling and new failover policies. In addition to simplifying the overall deployment and management of a complicated piece of infrastructure such as Jenkins,” says Micheal Benedict, Product Manager for the Cloud and the Data Infrastructure Group at Pinterest.

“We not only saw reduced build times but also huge efficiency wins. For instance, the team reclaimed over 80 percent of capacity during non-peak hours. As a result, the Jenkins Kubernetes cluster now uses 30 percent fewer instance hours per day when compared to the previous static cluster.”

How Can Bacancy Save Your Kubernetes Costs?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is Kubernetes cost-effective for small businesses?

Yes, Kubernetes can be cost-effective, but only if strategies are implemented efficiently.

How can I estimate Kubernetes cost for my application?

You can estimate costs by considering the following factors:

• Storage requirements
• Resource needs
• Network traffic
• Cloud tools

Are there any cost management tools designed explicitly for Kubernetes?

Kubecost, Kubecube, Kost, and cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Clouds are the cost management tools designed for Kubernetes.

How can I ensure cost predictability in my Kubernetes environment?

You can ensure cost predictability by setting up a budget to track expenses, plan cost allocation, and leverage spot instances for cost efficiency in Kubernetes environments.