Simplifying Kubernetes Cost Management With Harness

Implementing any or all of the cost management strategies we went over in earlier blogs can be time-consuming and risky. Depending on your needs, timelines, and bandwidth, it could be that you leave money on the table that you know you could be saving if only you could get around to it. This is where using good cloud cost management tools comes in handy. There are lots of great tools out there already for cloud cost management, but what about container costs, like with Kubernetes? Let's dig into simplifying Kubernetes cost management with Harness.

Harness Cloud Cost Management was built with container cost optimization as the primary focus. The same way that complexity in cloud costs is abstracted away by existing tools, Harness Cloud Cost Management paints an easy-to-understand picture of your Kubernetes costs.

In particular, Harness Cloud Cost Management simplifies the entirety of the overarching cost management strategy, providing a solution for cost visibility, cost savings, and cost forecasting. By using Harness, you’re implementing all three legs of cost management for Kubernetes and creating a strong feedback loop, letting you rest assured that you’re doing right by both performance and cost. There are many Kubernetes benefits, and we can learn how to get cloud cost savings alongside them.

This article contains an excerpt from our eBook, Cost Management Strategies for Kubernetes. If you like the content you see, stick around to the end where we’ll link the full eBook for you. It’s free - and best of all, ungated.

Cost Visibility in Harness

Harness provides you the ability to implement and use each of the cost visibility strategies without additional legwork, and a customizable view into your costs, no matter how you’re organized.

• Transform cost data at a macro and micro level, and get hourly granularity into your Kubernetes costs and where they come from
• Provide idle and unallocated visibility of resources to enable quick understanding and early wins in cost savings
• Organize costs and map them back to owners via Perspectives
• Break down and correlate costs by utilized, idle, and unallocated resources, as well as engineering changes like software deployments, config changes, and autoscaling with Root Cost Analysis
• Proactively identify, alert, and manage even the smallest of cost spikes before they snowball into a surprise on your cloud bill at the end of the month with Anomaly Detection

Cost Savings in Harness

• Tie into your CI/CD pipeline to take your resource recommendations and more closely match CI/CD provisioning process to optimal patterns based on your usage
• Get data-backed recommendations for Kubernetes resource request and limit changes and optimize the usage of infrastructure
• Use Perspectives to view savings for specific contexts including teams, projects, business units, and nodes
• Run “what if” scenarios to optimize between performance and cost and analyze the impact of each

Cost Forecasting in Harness

• View cost forecasts for specific contexts including teams, projects, business units, and nodes using Perspectives
• Create and enforce budgets that are backed by your historical usage patterns
• Use continuous forecasting updates to proactively respond to cost changes before they result in budget overrun
• Plan in advance the kinds of resources you’ll need to provision based on forecasted cost and known engineering needs

Running Kubernetes "What If" Scenarios: An Industry First

Resource sizing recommendations in Kubernetes shouldn’t be limited to optimizing for cost. What if you need to optimize for performance? Or what if you’re tasked with finding the right balance between performance and cost depending on your key needs and metrics?

Harness Cloud Cost Management lets you perform what we call a “what if” analysis for your Kubernetes resources. By default, resource optimization recommendations show both a cost-optimized and a performance-optimized resource profile. If that’s not enough, you can create a custom lens through which to tune optimization recommendations to balance cost and performance.

Armed with this analysis, you’ll be able to leverage Harness to create the best Kubernetes resource profile based on your organization’s needs:

• Optimize workloads based on performance, cost, or the right balance between them
• Run “what if” scenarios to change CPU and memory thresholds to view their impact on cost
• Illustrate the coverage of CPU and memory samples based on historical patterns of usage
• Account for seasonality based on changing time periods to analyze how the recommended configurations are impacted

Conclusion

At Harness, we have the opportunity to see how hundreds of organizations implement cost management strategies. Consistently, we’ve seen that organizations of all sizes struggle to get deep visibility into their costs, don’t know how or why they should optimize their infrastructure, and repeatedly run into budgeting issues. As organizations deliver more software faster than ever before in the cloud and using Kubernetes, it becomes imperative to create a solid foundation for understanding and stemming the accompanying costs.

Ultimately, cost management in the cloud and in Kubernetes requires effort that branches across teams in an organization, from finance, to engineering, to IT, to operations. Determining and then implementing the right strategy based on the needs of all these stakeholders is a worthwhile investment at any organization. In fact, even without tools to aid them, many organizations take advantage of these exact strategies in flavors that make sense for them.

Even if one of these cost management strategies doesn’t exactly meet your needs, use them freely as a basis for formulating your own strategy that meets the growing and complicated needs around Kubernetes cost management.

We hope you enjoyed this final eBook excerpt on simplifying Kubernetes costs with Harness. If you want to read the whole thing, you can simply download the full eBook right now - it’s free and doesn’t require an email address! Download the Cost Management Strategies for Kubernetes eBook now.