One of the mistakes organizations make related to Kubernetes costs is addressing them primarily after-the-fact, once the application is running successfully. There are certainly changes that can be made to improve efficiency once the application is running, but cost-control measures are best considered at the beginning, not middle or end, of the application lifecycle.

In surveys about why organizations adopt Kubernetes, a desire to reduce overall IT costs is an oft-cited reason for adopting containers and Kubernetes. Yet after the fact, when organizations talk about surprises during Kubernetes adoption, many cite increased costs. So does Kubernetes reduce costs or not? Like so many things in life, it depends. Here are some of the reasons Kubernetes projects come in over-budget and how to avoid them.

How much does your Kubernetes service cost to operate? This seems like a simple question, right? It’s one thing to say how much your Kubernetes cluster itself costs to operate — that, after all, is a group of real servers, associated with a specific number.

Chief Architect at Drift, Freedom Dumalo, recently spoke with the CloudZero team about how they’ve successfully cut cloud costs by $2.4M in just a few months. When the world rapidly transitioned to work from home, Drift, the conversational marketing platform known for their chatbots, saw a spike in their customer utilization. The largest usage spike were among new users experimenting with their free trial. This increase in engagement was a great sign for their business.

After growing Carbon Black from nothing to over 800 employees, Founder and CTO Ben Johnson turned his attention to the security of SaaS applications with new startup Obsidian Security. Obsidian secures companies like Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, Slack and Zoom. This time around, Ben is a seasoned founder and is proactively thinking about how to scale his company with healthy product margins. He uses CloudZero to monitor his AWS costs, detect anomalies, and enable his engineering team.

I was speaking with a VP of Engineering friend at last year’s KubeCon about how to pitch Kubernetes to the C-Suite. The benefits for innovation were clear - containerized microservices empowered her small teams to deliver more value, more rapidly. As is often the case with Boardroom discussions, though, the question of cost was always next. Sure, they want you to innovate - as long as it’s within the constraints of a budget! But cost discussions around Kubernetes can be difficult.

Think of orgs with lots of data and it’s impossible to not think of Netflix. In a new Netflix Technology Blog, titled "Byte Down: Making Netflix’s Data Infrastructure Cost-Effective", their Platform Data Science & Engineering team describe their data infrastructure "which is composed of dozens of data platforms, hundreds of data producers and consumers, and petabytes of data.” At this scale, cost-effectiveness is a critical matter of success and failure.

As cloud environments grow and evolve more rapidly than ever, and with new cloud services emerging every day, achieving and maintaining a high level of organization across hundreds of resources and global teams can seem like a daunting task. However, it’s not impossible, and can be done through tagging. This post will cover the fundamentals of tags, as well as a comprehensive roadmap to developing a tagging strategy.

Innovation drives success. And today more than ever, software drives innovation. No matter what product or service you offer, you’re a software company. You may not sell something called “software,” but successfully building, marketing, delivering, and supporting customers for any product today relies on software and technology. Innovation is what software developers do. And software developers are at the center of what CloudZero does.

Today, you probably wouldn’t blink at the idea of involving security in your development process. In fact, “shifting security left” has become so commonplace in the security industry, that there are conferences and job titles dedicated to SecOps (or DevSecOps or SecDevOps *eye roll emoji*). Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that the massive transition to this mindset took place.