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.

I’ve been writing about continuous cloud optimization for a while now, and recently, I’ve spoken with several organizations to understand any challenges they’re currently facing in their automation journey. Their insights would help us understand how we can improve our technology to better support them. I discovered two fundamental themes behind their challenges.

This year’s AWS Summits are more than a little different. Despite being virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, AWS is packing these events with lots of content. I’ve had a great time attending virtually, trying out hands-on labs, and sitting in on the technical sessions. As I work primarily with cost management and optimization for cloud compute services, this has been my main interest in attending the conferences. Here are my main takeaways around better managing your AWS cloud costs.

If you have discovered that your application demand changes over time, you’re probably wondering how you can continuously adjust your cloud capacity in accordance to application demand. If you use CloudFormation, then you’re in luck! This article walks through how you can update your template code to automatically implement infrastructure adjustments, periodically.

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.

Whether it be a tweets about shocking AWS bills or the impact of cloud bills on tech company margins, cloud costs are a hot topic. If you're looking to get up to speed and learn a little more, check out this collection of podcasts, blogs, and articles.