Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
An Uncertain Economy Impacts Enterprises' Kubernetes Practices
By Stacy Tumarkin, Head of Operations at Kubecost
Economic conditions will have an
outsized effect on enterprises' Kubernetes strategies in 2023, as businesses
navigate reining in development costs without
hampering growth and productivity.
With macro forces in mind, here are
three predictions for how enterprises will approach their Kubernetes
deployments in the coming year:
1) Enterprises will be cutting
(unnecessary) Kubernetes costs wherever they can.
Kubernetes cost efficiency was not a
top priority amid the initial excitement around Kubernetes adoption and the
rush to implement modern development practices (and as a result, Kubernetes
costs have ballooned). Now that economic headwinds have enterprises tightening
budgets and adopting more conservative spending postures, understanding cost
drivers and implementing controls will increasingly be a focus.
Additionally, inefficiencies that
were tolerable in smaller-scale Kubernetes testing have led to exorbitant
overspend when Kubernetes environments ramped up to enterprise scale. And
automation built to support modernized cloud infrastructure tooling only
contributes to these issues: it's easier than ever to overprovision resources
for Kubernetes, and often quite difficult to visualize which processes are
responsible for costly overprovisioning. In 2023, Kubernetes cost visibility
that puts overprovisioning under a microscope will be a top enterprise
priority. Increasingly popular tools like the open source CNCF
project OpenCost will see even more adoption.
2) Cultural change will be at the
heart of enterprises' Kubernetes cost control strategies.
The imperative to control Kubernetes
overspending will lead enterprises down a path of pairing greater cost visibility for development teams with
greater cost responsibility in the
form of governance models. First, enterprises will adopt Kubernetes monitoring
to deliver granular, real-time cloud cost visibility and management and assign
costs to individual teams, making cost drivers clear even in multi-tenant
environments. We expect enterprises to then begin pushing for cultural changes
that emphasize budget-level accountability at the team level. This will start
with showbacks that give team leaders visibility into the costs they're
responsible for, and then ramp up to chargebacks, where teams are actually
paying for their unnecessary costs. In 2023, reducing Kubernetes spending bloat
won't be a one-off project; organizations will be looking to instill a culture
of cost-efficiency as they scale their containerized applications.
3) Enterprises will hone the developer experience they offer as it relates to
Kubernetes.
A challenging economy will lead to
smaller dev and engineering teams-and make the tools and processes that
organizations use for Kubernetes even more critical. While Kubernetes
migrations and growth are not expected to slow down, enterprise teams will be
expected to do more with fewer resources. Since Kubernetes can already be complex
to use effectively, organizations must create strategies to make the "do
more with less" approach actually work. Turning governance models into
scalable, automated optimization strategies will be more important than ever;
it'll be crucial for teams to get this right in order to meaningfully
streamline Kubernetes management and monitoring.
More specifically, I think we'll see
more organizations start using internal developer platforms (IDPs) to make it
easier for developers to manage and use Kubernetes resources. Additionally,
more robust governance for Kubernetes will play a role in improving developer
efficiency in 2023. By providing clear guidelines and policies for managing
Kubernetes resources at scale, organizations can help developers navigate the complexities
of the platform and avoid common mistakes. This maturing developer environment
will improve confidence and proficiency with Kubernetes in 2023, making it
easier for developers to use the platform effectively and efficiently.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacy
Tumarkin is Head of Operations at Kubecost,
a solution for Kubernetes cost monitoring and management at scale. She has
helped scale finance and operations in leadership roles at multiple high-growth
companies, and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of
Business.