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Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps Cost Optimization

Best Practices to Reduce Amazon ECS Costs

What is Amazon ECS?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. It seamlessly integrates with Docker and AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), enabling organizations to provide a scalable and cost-effective environment for running containerized workloads on AWS.

How Amazon ECS Works?

An Amazon ECS cluster is a logical grouping of tasks or services. Tasks and services are run on infrastructure registered to the cluster, which can include:

  • AWS Fargate: A serverless compute engine that eliminates the need to manage servers or clusters, charging based on vCPU and memory usage
  • Amazon EC2 Instances: Provides users with full control over the underlying virtual machine infrastructure while running ECS workloads.

Amazon ECS Pricing: What you need to know?

Understanding Amazon ECS pricing is crucial for optimizing cloud costs. Amazon ECS pricing is based on two main components:

  1. Infrastructure Cost
    This is the cost of the underlying infrastructure used to run your ECS workloads. The pricing depends on whether you are using AWS Fargate or Amazon EC2 instances:
    • AWS Fargate: Charged based on vCPU and memory usage starting when a container launches and stopping when it terminates. Additional charges  apply for operating systems, CPU architecture, and ephemeral storage.
    • Amazon EC2 Instances: There is no additional charge for ECS itself when using EC2. You pay for the EC2 instances (On-Demand, Reserved, or Spot instances) that you provision and manage, including storage and data transfer costs (e.g., cross-region communication).
  2. Additional AWS Services Costs
    While Amazon ECS itself does not incur extra charges, additional services integrated with ECS contribute to overall costs:
    • CloudWatch Metrics: Default ECS metrics (e.g., CPU/Memory Utilization) are free, but custom metrics through CloudWatch Container Insights are billed as custom metrics.
    • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Any load balancing used to distribute traffic across your ECS tasks incurs charges.
    • Data Transfer: Inter-region data transfer or external network egress adds to your AWS bill

Optimization Challenges with Amazon ECS

Over-Provisioning Resources
Many organizations overestimate resource requirements, leading to increased costs and underutilized capacity. Determining the right CPU and memory allocations for tasks can be complex without precise usage insights.

Limited Built-in Monitoring

While Amazon ECS provides default metrics through Amazon CloudWatch, these may not always offer deep visibility into workload performance and resource usage. To address gaps in default metrics, businesses often enable CloudWatch Container Insights to gather additional data. While custom metrics provide valuable insights, they come with added costs and require proper configuration, such as enabling Container Insights.

Managing Spot Instance Availability
While Fargate Spot instances provide significant savings, their availability can be unpredictable. Businesses must balance cost savings with workload reliability when using Spot instances for critical tasks.

Best Cost Optimization Strategies for Amazon ECS

Effective cost management is critical for running containerized applications on Amazon ECS. To maximize savings, businesses must right-size resources, monitor workloads effectively, and choose the right compute options.

Here’s how CloudCADI helps optimize Amazon ECS costs,

  1. Right-Sizing Task Definitions: CloudCADI analyses your ECS task’s CPU and memory usage and recommends optimal configurations. E.g.: For instance, if a task is configured with 1 vCPU and 2 GB memory but only utilizes 0.25 vCPU and 512 MB, CloudCADI suggests scaling down the task definition to match actual usage, thereby minimizing waste. 
  2. Optimizing EC2 Launch Types: CloudCADI evaluates your cluster’s EC2 instance usage and provides actionable recommendations. Switch to Existing Instances: If underutilized EC2 instances are available, it suggests running tasks on these resources instead of Fargate. Provisioning New EC2 Instances: If no instances are available, CloudCADI helps determine the most cost-efficient EC2 instance type to support your workload.
  3. Right-Sizing EC2 Instances: For ECS clusters running on EC2, CloudCADI assesses the instance types and usage. If over-provisioned instances (e.g., 4 vCPU and 16 GB memory) are detected for a workload needing only 2 vCPU and 8 GB, it recommends switching to a smaller, cost-efficient instance type.
  4. Leveraging Fargate Spot Instances: For non-critical and fault-tolerant workloads, CloudCADI recommends using Fargate Spot instances, which can save up to 70% compared to regular Fargate pricing. The tool identifies suitable tasks and assists in transitioning to this cost-effective option.

Key Benefits of Using CloudCADI for Amazon ECS Cost Management

  • Automated Cost Insights – Identify and eliminate wasteful resource allocations.
  • Optimized ECS Task Definitions – Reduce memory and vCPU over-provisioning.
  • EC2 & Fargate Optimization – Get real-time recommendations on EC2 instance types and Fargate Spot usage.
  • Cost-Aware Scaling – Ensure workloads run on the most cost-effective AWS infrastructure.
  • Enhanced Monitoring – Gain deeper insights into ECS resource usage without unnecessary CloudWatch costs.

Conclusion

Optimizing Amazon ECS workloads is crucial for reducing operational costs and maintaining efficiency. CloudCADI is an indispensable tool for businesses using Amazon ECS. With intelligent resource recommendations and continuous performance monitoring, CloudCADI ensures your ECS configurations are optimized for cost-effectiveness and performance. By leveraging CloudCADI’s insights, organizations can lower costs by right-sizing tasks and instances and scale workloads efficiently using cost-effective strategies like Fargate Spot and EC2. 

Want to reduce your Amazon ECS costs? Try CloudCADI today and start saving!

Preethika
Preethika Nagarajan - Senior Software Engineer

Author

Preethika Nagarajan, is our  Software Engineer L2 who has played a key role in Amazon ECS Optimization feature of CloudCADI.

Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps Cloud Resources Management

Azure SQL Database Cost Optimization Tips

Azure SQL Database cost optimization is a much sought after request we get from our customers. Azure SQL Database is a powerful, fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that eliminates the need for businesses to handle maintenance, security, and reliability. Despite its versatility, effectively managing costs within Azure SQL Database can be complex, especially when dealing with different purchasing models and configuration options. This is where CloudCADI steps in, providing the insights and automation necessary to optimize your Azure SQL Database investments.

Azure SQL Database Overview

Azure SQL Database offers flexibility with two main purchasing models:

  1. vCore-Based Purchasing Model:
    • Customization: Users can select the number of vCores, memory, and storage speed, providing more control over database performance.
    • Scalability: Ideal for applications with specific resource needs, allowing for precise performance tuning.
  2. DTU-Based Purchasing Model:
    • Simplicity: Users choose the number of DTUs, which represent a mix of CPU, memory, reads, and writes.
    • Predictability: This model offers fixed compute sizes, storage, and backup retention, simplifying budgeting and cost forecasting.

How CloudCADI Enhances Azure SQL Database Management

CloudCADI is a cloud cost optimization platform that helps businesses maximize their cloud investments. By offering granular insights and actionable recommendations on Azure SQL Database, CloudCADI ensures that your database configurations are both efficient and cost-effective.

1. Intelligent Benchmarking for Optimal Configuration Selection

When migrating to Azure SQL Database, choosing the correct compute tier is crucial for balancing performance and cost. CloudCADI analyzes your existing workloads and recommend the most suitable configuration—whether it’s the vCore or DTU model. This helps prevent over-provisioning and under-utilization of resources, ensuring that your databases run efficiently.

2. Dynamic Scaling with Serverless Compute Tier

For databases with unpredictable traffic patterns, Azure SQL Database’s serverless compute tier automatically adjusts CPU resources based on demand. CloudCADI continuously monitors these traffic patterns and provides recommendations on to leverage the serverless option. This ensures you only pay for the resources you use, leading to significant cost savings.

3. Optimizing Single Database Configurations

If your database has regular traffic and predictable computational needs, selecting the appropriate configuration is key. CloudCADI helps determine when to use the Provisioned vCore or DTU models for such databases. Furthermore, if one of your databases experiences dramatically low usage than others, CloudCADI can advise to resize the configuration to optimize both performance and cost.

4. Efficient Resource Management with SQL Elastic Pools

SQL Elastic Pools allow multiple databases to share resources, making it easier to manage fluctuations in usage. CloudCADI’s advanced analytics help you allocate resources across your databases more effectively, ensuring that you’re not overpaying for underutilized capacity. If a particular database is consuming a disproportionate amount of resources within an Elastic Pool, CloudCADI will recommend  to resize the configuration, thus balancing cost and performance across your environment.

Cost Optimization Tips with CloudCADI

Effective cost management is crucial for any cloud-based database solution. CloudCADI provides several strategies to help you optimize your Azure SQL Database costs:

  • Right-Sizing Resources: CloudCADI analyzes your application’s needs and recommends the most appropriate database configuration. For example, it may suggest moving a high-usage database from an Elastic Pool to a Single Database model to reduce overall costs.
  • Performance Monitoring and Adjustments: CloudCADI continuously monitors key performance metrics such as CPU usage, DTU percentages, and deadlocks. Based on these insights, it provides actionable recommendations to scale down resources if they’re underutilized or to optimize queries for better performance.

Conclusion

CloudCADI is an indispensable tool for businesses using Azure SQL Database, helping them achieve optimal performance while controlling costs. Through intelligent benchmarking, dynamic scaling, and continuous performance monitoring, CloudCADI ensures that your Azure SQL Database configurations are tailored to your specific needs, making your cloud investment as efficient and cost-effective as possible. Whether managing a single database or a complex multi-tenant environment, CloudCADI provides the tools and insights necessary to maximize the value of your cloud infrastructure.

Product Engineering Head
Karthick Perumal - Product Eng. Head

Author

Karthick Perumal leads our Product Engineering team with over 16 years of extensive IT experience. He is a certified cloud engineer. His calm and composed approach consistently drives the team forward, ensuring focus and motivation even in challenging circumstances.

Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Cloud FinOps FAQs

Cloud has become an integral component for successful business operations. However, alongside the benefits of cloud computing come the complexities of managing costs effectively. Enter Cloud FinOps, a discipline aimed at optimizing cloud spending while maximizing value. It continues to be one of the top cloud priorities in 2024 and the coming years. As organizations embark on this new journey, numerous questions arise regarding FinOps practices. This article covers a few with responses from our cloud finops experts themselves Kathick Perumal, Product Engineering Head and Mukesh Kumar, our Product Architect who holds profound experience in tackling cloud finops challenges of our clients.

1. What is Cloud FinOps?

Cloud FinOps is a practise which enables organization to maximize the value derived from their cloud resources spending.

2. What does Cloud FinOps do?

It offers multiple benefits to the cloud businesses. In a nutshell, it enables developers, operations, finance, and other business teams in comprehending and managing costs associated with cloud computing.
Suggested Reading: What are the benefits of cloud finops?

3. Why is Cloud FinOps important?

Cloud finops is vital for various reasons. It is crucial in solving some of the key challenges like,

  • There is a lack of accountability and control over the cloud spending.
  • Absence of continuous cloud resource tracking and monitoring
  • Failure to implement optimal practices for cost reduction.
  • Delay in problem identification and rectification costs huge.
  • Loss of control over cloud asset growth as the organisation scale up.
  • Difficulty in finding the best cloud resource alternatives.

4. How Cloud Service Providers help in Cloud Cost Optimization?

CSPs do give us a lot of options through which we can realize considerable savings.

  • Pay-as-You-Go Pricing: Cloud services often follow a pay-as-you-go model, allowing users to pay only for the resources they consume. This flexibility helps in cost optimization by avoiding upfront costs for unused resources.
  • Reserved Instances: Cloud providers offer reserved instances or commitments, where users can commit to a specific number of resources for a term, often at a discounted rate compared to on-demand pricing.
  • Spot Instances: Some cloud providers offer spot instances, allowing users to bid for unused compute capacity at a lower cost. This can be cost-effective for certain workloads that are flexible in their resource requirements.
  • Auto-Scaling: Cloud platforms allow for automatic scaling of resources based on demand. This ensures that you only use and pay for the resources you need when you need them, helping to optimize costs.
  • Resource Monitoring and Management Tools: Cloud providers offer tools that allow users to monitor resource usage and costs in real-time. This visibility helps in identifying areas for optimization and cost savings.
  • Discounts and Incentive Programs: Cloud providers often provide discounts for long-term commitments, volume usage, or specific use cases. Additionally, they may offer incentive programs to encourage cost-conscious usage.
  • Cost Management Services: Cloud providers offer cost management and budgeting tools that help users set, track, and manage their spending. Alerts and reports assist in keeping costs within predefined budgets.
  • Global Presence: Cloud providers have a global network of data centers. Utilizing resources in regions where costs are lower or taking advantage of content delivery networks (CDNs) can result in cost savings.

5. What are the easiest ways to control cloud costs?

While there are many, enterprises miss to leverage some of the simple options available in hand,

  • Wherever possible, use reserved instances rather than pay-as-you-go instances.
  • Remove unused or idle resources by continuously monitoring the resources all the time.
  • Optimize the application architecture to maximize data ingress and egress. Ingress is free. But egress is chargeable based on the size of the data you transfer.

6. Is it possible to save money without compromising the performance?

Yes, a lot of cost savings can be achieved by continuous monitoring and optimizing your cloud usage for orphans and unused resources. Beyond reducing you can even witness improving performance levels.

In CloudCADI, we monitor for Orphan/Unused Disk, Public IP Address, load balancer, SQL servers, NAT gateway, Application Gateway, etc.

7. What are the trivial things that impact largely in cloud costs?

Well, there are many. They might seem small at the early stages of cloud adoption. The team’s focus will be more on the project, deliverables, and deadlines forgetting the fact that every resource they install/download start accumulating the bills either they use it to its fullest or not.

Examples are, leaving unused resources that are not actively contributing to operations, inefficient resource sizing, neglecting to properly tag and organize resources for cost allocation, etc. These can bring impacts like, wasting money on excessive resources or experiencing performance issues due to insufficient resources, difficulties in tracking and attributing costs to specific projects or departments.

8. What are the possible ways to overcome cloud costs?

  • Setting up notifications for out-of-the-ordinary spending or usage habits.
  • Optimizing cloud resource allocation for maximum efficiency.
  • Making use of rightsizing approaches to match resources to actual demands.

You can rely on CloudCADI for all these needs. It does a phenomenal job.

9. Finops Consultants or FinOps Tools?

The choice between FinOps consultants and FinOps tools depends on various factors, including the specific needs and circumstances of the client’s organization.

FinOps consultants bring in-depth knowledge and expertise in FinOps practices to the organisation. They can provide personalized approach by taking a holistic view of the organization needs.

While on the other hand, Finops tools brings multiple advantages, like automating certain aspects of cloud cost management, make the process less human error prone, continuous monitoring, detailed break downs and reports.

10. Why FinOps is an organization wide practice?

We always insist this to our customers. FinOps is not constrained to the cloud engineering division, it’s  an organization wide cross functional collaborative practice. It involves all three hierarchies – engineering team, operations team, and finance team. Every stakeholder requires a solid information on the cloud usage, performance, and cost in their terms. So that they become accountable of their choices and can map it to their relevant goals.

Do you have any more questions? Write to us: Contact Amadis Experts

Authors

Product Engineering Head
Karthick Perumal - Product Eng. Head
Product Eng. Lead Amadis
Mukesh Kumar - Product Architect
Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Why CloudCADI Should Be Your Cloud FinOps Tool?

Cloud FinOps products & tools are essential for enterprises to effectively manage, optimize, and control their cloud costs. They offer a plethora of benefits allowing organizations to make data-driven decisions, achieve cost savings, and maximize the value of their cloud investments. Let’s dig deep into some of its benefits.

What Are The Benefits of Cloud FinOps Tools?

1. Cost Optimization: They tell you where you can save.

Cloud FinOps tools help enterprises optimize their cloud spending by providing insights into usage patterns, identifying cost-saving opportunities, and enabling effective cost-management strategies. They allow to monitor and control cloud costs, avoid unnecessary expenses, and make informed decisions to optimize their cloud investments.

2. Financial Visibility: They break down your cloud spend.

Cloud FinOps tools offer financial visibility by providing detailed reports and analytics on cloud costs. They help enterprises understand their cloud spending across different services, business units, projects, or regions. This visibility enables better budgeting, forecasting, and cost allocation, empowering organizations to track and manage their cloud financials effectively.

3. Resource Efficiency: They show ways to leverage your cloud resources.

Cloud FinOps tools enable enterprises to optimize resource allocation and utilization. They help identify underutilized or idle resources, recommend rightsizing opportunities, and enable efficient scaling and provisioning of cloud resources. By optimizing resource usage, enterprises can eliminate wasteful spending and achieve better overall resource efficiency.

4. Cost Accountability: They turn cloud stakeholders financially accountable.

Cloud FinOps tools facilitate cost accountability by providing cost visibility to different stakeholders within the enterprise. They enable cost tracking and chargeback/showback mechanisms, allowing business units or teams to understand and manage their cloud spending. This promotes transparency, accountability, and cost-conscious decision-making throughout the organization.

5. Collaboration and Communication: They provide cross-functional collaboration.

Cloud FinOps tools foster collaboration between finance, IT, and business teams. They provide a common platform for discussions, cost analysis, and decision-making related to cloud spending.

6. Scalability and Growth: They align your financial goals with technical objectives.

Cloud FinOps tools support enterprises in scaling their cloud operations efficiently. As organizations grow and their cloud usage expands, these tools enable proactive cost management and scalability planning. They provide insights into the cost implications of scaling, help forecast future costs, and enable enterprises to align their cloud spending with business growth objectives.

Why Should You Choose CloudCADI?

CloudCADI (Cognitive & Actionable Data Insights) is an all-in-one cloud cost optimization tool that can supercharge your cloud cost management. From granular cost breakdowns to actionable recommendations, our tool provides the ultimate financial visibility and control.

While CloudCADI offers a wide range of benefits, we highlight three need-of-the-hour features that solved most of our client’s cost optimization challenges.

CloudCADI has Externalized Business Rule Engine (EBRE):

An externalized business rule engine (EBRE) refers to a software component or system that separates business rules from application code and stores them in an external repository or engine. It allows business rules to be managed independently of the application logic, enabling greater flexibility, maintainability, and agility in decision-making processes.

Some of its benefits include:

  1. Business-User Friendly: An EBRE is designed to be accessible to business users and subject matter experts who have domain knowledge but may not possess programming skills. It provides a user-friendly interface to manage rules, empowering non-technical users to participate in the rule development process.
  2. Agility and Flexibility: With an EBRE, CloudCADI allows business rules to be modified and updated independently of the underlying application logic. This promotes agility and flexibility in adapting to changing business requirements without the need for code changes or application redeployment.
  3. Separation of Concerns: Externalizing business rules improves maintainability, modularity, and readability by allowing developers to focus on application logic while business experts concentrate on defining and managing the rules. It in turn promotes collaboration and reduces the time required to implement rule changes.
  4.  Target-driven approach: Business users have the option to set utilization targets and derive actionable insights & recommendations for execution. Like the traditional data center optimization models, this target-driven optimization using CloudCADI EBRE provides the technology team with the much-needed, end-state visualization before implementing the changes.

CloudCADI is Non-intrusive:

When an enterprise wishes to start cloud cost optimization with CloudCADI, all they need to give us is just a reader-level role for their cloud subscription. Our product starts its work right from there through the cloud service provider’s logs. Unlike other major cloud finops tools in the market, CloudCADI is agentless, (do not load agents),  and exports any of your confidential data outside your secured networks.

A few benefits include:

  1. Security: CloudCADI ensures the security and privacy of your cloud cost data. It sits within your cloud environment without any third-party external agents that require access to your sensitive cloud information.  
  2. Minimized disruption: CloudCADI identifies cost-saving opportunities without requiring significant changes to your existing infrastructure or application architecture. It analyses your cloud usage and spending patterns, providing recommendations to optimize costs while minimizing disruption.
  3. Easy Implementation: CloudCADI can be implemented with minimal effort and configuration. It typically integrates with your existing cloud environment seamlessly. Within 2 weeks you can start optimizing your cloud infrastructure.

CloudCADI is Cloud-native:

CloudCADI is a cloud-native solution leveraging the cloud-native components for its deployment and functioning.

Some of its benefits are:

  1. No additional compute: CloudCADI utilizes customers’ existing cloud services for its necessary data extraction required for optimization. Thus differs from many cloud finops tools in the market that writes separate scripts on the client instances consuming significant compute power and associated costs.
  2. Agility: CloudCADI embraces the principles of agility, allowing for faster deployment and iteration cycles. They leverage containerization and monolithic architecture, enabling rapid updates and feature releases, thereby improving time-to-market.

Role-Based Access:

Not all cloud stakeholders require all cloud financials. While the business heads focus on the expenses overview for a defined period, cloud engineers will look for a granular breakdown that can lead them to the ultimate cause. CloudCADI has the flexibility to restrict or grant view permissions for users.

Self-Service Analytics / Dashboard View: You can grant or restrict user permissions to view cost summary, service category, performance, and/or highly utilized resources as per the user. For example, resources’ performance and highly utilized resources chart alone could be given to engineers who handle restructuring.

Advisor recommendations: This is our key feature that allows users to start optimizing almost immediately with multiple choices. This makes it more valuable to engineers rather than the CIOs. You can make this read-only access for them, so they focus on what is required.

Settings: You even have the facility to restrict CloudCADI usage settings like the cloud account information, tags, and members according to the user. This allows you to protect your secret cloud account credentials, usage, etc. intra-organization.

CloudCADI Integrates with Service Now:

Enterprises use ServiceNow ticketing for various reasons like centralized ticketing management, streamlined ticket workflows, self-service capabilities, and enhanced reporting.

If you are a large enterprise with multiple disconnected teams handling ‘n’ a number of cloud resources for diverse set deliverables and using ServiceNow as your ticketing software, you are in safe hands.

CloudCADI can be easily integrated with your ServiceNow in just a few seconds. Beyond the visualization of your cloud environment, this paves the way to take action on the optimization recommendations. With this, the cloud cost optimization becomes seamless eliminating manual error-prone communications and efforts. 

Start Now!

Are you excited about the above features? We have just listed a few and there are many more to experience. Reach out to us for a demo today. Start optimizing your cloud investment without compromising your performance.

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Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 1

Cloud containers come with the flexibility to lift and shift applications to any environment, cloud or virtual, or bare metal without worrying about the virtual OS, hypervisors, etc.  Simplified management, paced-up delivery, and agility compel cloud developers to hail containerization. Kubernetes aka k8s (if you are wondering what k8 means, it’s just a replacement of 8 letters “ubernete”) is a popular open-source containerization platform cloud developers adopt widely. According to a recent report by CNCF, there is a 67% increase in Kubernetes developers worldwide which manifests the popularity.

The sad news is the surge in adoption and usage comes with a compromise in the IT infrastructure budget. Enterprises could be wasting nearly 80% of Kubernetes expenses on unintentional resources that are not helping organizations to hit their goals as planned. Let’s see in this blog what are the challenges and ways to optimize.

Challenges in Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Charged as a whole:

A cluster contains multiple nodes within. Each node will, in turn, contain a varying number of containers. Every node that is present inside one cluster is not necessarily part of the same application as others. Each node may be handled by 20 different teams for different applications. But the cluster is charged as a whole or clusters together by the cloud service providers. Billing starts right when a container is deployed into a node. The additional cost of $2.4/day is charged for Kubernetes cluster maintenance, software license, disaster recovery, etc.

Showback and chargeback – Near Impossible:

These two processes are vital for enterprises to bring financial accountability. (Showback is the process that gives visibility to a business unit’s expenses on cloud resources usage for a particular period but not charged. Whereas chargeback is where the unit is informed as well as charged based on its utilization.) Tagging, which can aid the engineers in cost tracking is not possible in Kubernetes clusters.

Every penny we invest becomes worthy when it checks the list of features/output we planned. When they just stay at the expense side mapped to no production, then the ultimate source for the anomalies should be identified. But it is not as simple as it sounds for Kubernetes clusters. Spotting the team responsible for most of the expenses is daunting as each container may be utilized by different teams in the enterprise working on different deliverables. Each team’s Infrastructure budget and resource cost allocation varies on the other hand.

Multi-cloud adoption:

In Gartner’s recent survey, 81% of the respondents stated that they use 2 or more cloud service providers to avail of various benefits like overcoming vendor- lock-in, resource discounts, disaster recovery, etc. Kubernetes clusters will contain workloads from different cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. which further twists the cost anomalies detection and Kubernetes cost optimization process.

Dynamic Autoscaling

One of the key reasons for cloud engineers to choose the Kubernetes cluster is its autoscaling feature. Depending on the usage demand, Kubernetes scales up or down so the resources suffice the compute requirement during peaks and valleys. Further in horizontal autoscaling, containers scale out which may reach from 2 to 20 within a day. Kubernetes cost optimization turns complicated because of this unpredicted autoscaling.

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices

Let’s look at the optimal ways to trim the inadvertent expenses.

 

  1. Quality of Services for Pods (QoS)

Kubernetes cluster offers cloud practitioners the flexibility to set different QoS classes to Pods. Based on this the Pods’ scheduling and removal become easier for cloud practitioners. It is of 3 types – Guaranteed, Burstable, and Best-Effort.

Guaranteed: 

When cloud engineers need to have a Pod, whose instances are sufficient to handle a highly critical app, they can configure it to be a guaranteed QoS class. So, both the CPU & memory limits and requests are the same and set. As the name suggests it guarantees minimal resources (Requests are the minimum number of resources and limits are the maximum resources it can use)

Burstable:

 A Burstable QoS class is assigned for a Pod when the vCPU or memory limit is more than the requests or not essentially the same. So, when the need arises for a spiked compute requirement, they can be utilized.

Best-Effort:

When both the limits and requests are not set, it is classified as a best-effort QoS class. Cloud engineers can avail for non-critical applications.

As we can clearly witness, Best-effort pods are the first choice for removal followed by Burstable and then Guaranteed.

Related reading: How to configure pods and containers?

2. ResourceQuotas & LimitRange

As we saw earlier, the Kubernetes cluster is shared by various teams. There is a possibility that one team may consume most of the Pods leaving other teams scarce. Namespace-level Pod restriction can mitigate this issue (Namespace is a virtual cluster). ResourceQuota is the means through which we can limit Pods’ usage within a Namespace.

Kubernetes administrators create a ResourceQuota for each Namespace. Whenever a user creates or updates a Pod within a Namespace, the ResourceQuota system checks if the limits are exceeded,  If it is crossing the limits, it returns a “403 FORBIDDEN” error denying the action.

LimitRange is another policy that helps with resource constraints individually. As the name goes limits the range of “limits & requests” within a Namespace.

3. Affinity

Pod/Node Affinity helps in influencing the pod scheduling that helps in resource optimization and, in turn the cost. Even though the scheduler does its job of equally spreading pods across the nodes, for some special cases like, when an application requires a specific hardware or licensing constraints, we can use Node Affinity to schedule pods onto specific nodes. This in turn avoids over provisioning of expensive resources and kubernetes cost management.

It is not done. Looking for more optimal ways to cut down Kubernetes costs? Read our next blog here : Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 2

Kubernetes Cost management can turn simple when you use CloudCADI. Try a demo today.

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Categories
Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

List of Best Cloud Cost Optimization Tools 2024

Enterprises globally prefer to use cloud cost optimization tools to maximize their cloud investments. While certain organizations use native tools provided by AWS, GCP, and Azure others tend to opt for homegrown tools or third-party tools. Few even mix up to reduce cloud spending. According to a report from report of the FinOps Foundation, enterprises use an average of 3.7 tools for their cloud cost optimization process. Let’s see in this article a few of the best cloud cost optimization tools you can evaluate for 2024.

1. CloudCADI

Cloud Native – It leverages the power of cloud features like scalability, elasticity, etc. facilitating faster deployment

Externalized Business Rule Engine – It allows the user to play around with multiple cloud assets recommendations, so the user has the flexibility to choose as per their infrastructure and project needs.

Non-intrusive nature – It stays within your cloud environment eliminating the need to worry about the security breach and third-party intrusion

Role-based data access – Customizing the cost optimization data visibility based on roles (Engineering team, Finance team, etc.) is simple with Cloud CADI.

Showback- It allows you to drill down and find the root cause of the cost overruns to take immediate actions.

End-to-End Automation- It facilitates the seamless integration of ticketing tools like ServiceNow.

Alerts- It has customizable reporting& alert capabilities to give visibility over IaaS/SaaS/PaaS services and assets, resulting in a better understanding of activities in the cloud

Clients – Johnson & Johnson, Unisys, GSM Outdoors, Exafluence, DigiKey

Founded – 2019

HQ: New Jersey, USA

Other Tools

‘Finops Foundation‘ is a non-profit organization that was established to promote best practices, standards, and education in the emerging field of cloud financial management, recently released a report on “Different Usage Types of FinOps Tools” (ref. figure below). Let’s see some of the tools mentioned,