Kubecost announced the launch of OpenCost, a new open source project that has been submitted for acceptance to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). OpenCost provides Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization as well as standardized methodologies for tracking Kubernetes costs. The launch is supported by an open source community with participation from cloud-industry leaders including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Armory, D2iQ, Google, Adobe, SUSE, Mindcurv, and New Relic. Kubecost aims to ensure that OpenCost is not owned by any single commercial entity-and that the project continues to evolve and thrive within the broader Kubernetes community.

The community of cloud industry leaders collaborating on OpenCost are developing industry standards and documentation that standardize methodologies and best practices for tracking Kubernetes costs. Founding companies of the OpenCost community are all heavy adopters of Kubernetes and have experience operating Kubernetes at scale. Industry support for OpenCost's mission is broad, and includes organizations from a variety of categories:

●      Cloud providers: AWS, Google
●      Other technology leaders: Adobe, Armory, D2iQ, Mindcurv, New Relic, and SUSE

"Kubecost has been committed to open source since day one - the core of our Kubecost offerings has always been built on open source code," said Webb Brown, Co-founder & CEO of Kubecost. "Now, we are releasing that code as the OpenCost project and collaborating with industry leaders to define new standards. Overspend is a rapidly growing problem among teams scaling their Kubernetes deployments, as the recent CNCF report showed. Roughly a quarter of organizations have no Kubernetes cost monitoring in place, and 44% only rely on monthly spend estimates. This comes against the backdrop of companies increasing their investment in Kubernetes, which makes cost monitoring even more important. OpenCost will be a valuable and fully open source solution for many organizations to quickly understand where that budget is going, and exactly how and where they can safely optimize it."

"AWS makes it easier for customers to run Kubernetes securely and reliably at scale to support mission critical workloads on premises and in the AWS cloud using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). As customers adopt Kubernetes, it's essential they have access to tools that help them monitor and optimize what they spend to run their Kubernetes applications," said Barry Cooks, Vice President, Kubernetes at AWS. "We're excited to work with the OpenCost community to define standards that help give customers a holistic view of their Kubernetes infrastructure and application spend. By making it easier for customers to monitor and optimize their Kubernetes spend, we can help them unlock even more value from Kubernetes across their organization."

OpenCost empowers developer, engineering, DevOps, and FinOps teams with actionable and accurate Kubernetes cost data and the capabilities required to significantly and continuously reduce Kubernetes-related cloud costs without impacting application performance. Teams can install OpenCost in minutes and get real-time data immediately. The tool runs inside Kubernetes clusters, and no data is sent out of a cluster without user permission.

OpenCost aims to standardize cost tracking, allocation, methodologies, and measurements to help teams using Kubernetes more easily understand their infrastructure costs. OpenCost will provide guidance across various in-cluster resource types-including compute, storage, network, and load balancers-and will address this problem by providing standard cost models, best practices, and guidance. Using OpenCost, development teams can align on how to allocate workloads costs, and ensure they are doing so in a standard, uniform manner. This standard enables teams to operate with a single cost-allocation model across their organizations and all their infrastructure environments. The goal is also to create standardization across cloud platforms, Kubernetes distributions, and teams using Kubernetes.

"Everyone is trying to track Kubernetes costs and allocations via different methodologies and measurements," said Brown. "By coming together as a community, we can clean this up for each other and for the broader user community."

Having experienced significant growth in parallel with the explosive use of Kubernetes, Kubecost is leveraging its industry leadership and knowledge to accelerate the development of OpenCost. Launched in 2019, Kubecost has helped organizations across industries and sizes-including Under Armor, Capital One, and Adobe-reduce their Kubernetes-related cloud spend by 60-80% without impacting application performance.

"We've seen firsthand how valuable Kubernetes cost visibility, monitoring, and optimization can be," said David Sterz, Solutions Architect at Mindcurv. "Particularly at scale, understanding where exactly our Kubernetes spend is coming from and how to avoid surprise bills is critical for planning. The release of OpenCost, including the standardization of terminology and approaches, makes it easier for organizations to unlock the benefits of Kubernetes. We're excited to see the project grow and evolve."