This week, Finout, the cloud cost observability platform, announced a new suite of tools to manage Kubernetes costs. To find out more, VMblog spoke with Roi Ravhon, CEO and Co-Founder of Finout.
VMblog: Do you think finance and engineering teams have a harder time managing Kubernetes costs than other cloud services?
Roi Ravhon: Yes. While other cost and cloud services can usually be managed with the native toolings (e.g. AWS Cost Explorer), when it comes to Kubernetes, there is no “commodity” way to consume resource costs. This poses a new set of challenges for finance and engineering, as even the most basic knowledge is missing, and external tools must be used. Often, what makes things even worse is that Kubernetes is using a different cost infrastructure than the rest – which forces the duplication of all practices (like budgets, allocations, and forecasting).
VMblog: Finout just announced a suite of tools to help companies understand and track their business health on Kubernetes. Can you explain a bit how it works?
Ravhon: Agentless Cost Governance Suite for Kubernetes includes:
- Unlimited Clusters: Analyze unlimited Kubernetes clusters with no additional charge.
- Unified MegaBill: Unlike any other solution in the market. Finout will contextualize Kubernetes spend alongside all other cloud providers and services in a unified dashboard.
- Budget and Forecasting: Set a budget for your Kubernetes deployment and then accurately track spend against that budget. Quickly identify any areas where there may be overspending and make adjustments accordingly. Forecasting leverages machine learning to predict future spend based on past patterns and anticipated changes in workload.
- Anomaly Detection: Identify spend anomalies across Kubernetes and all other major cloud services. Virtual tagging enables anomaly detection for specific teams or applications for greater profitability and accountability.
- Kubernetes CostGuard: Kubernetes cost optimization insights and dynamic recommendations that help organizations continuously manage and reduce their Kubernetes spend.
VMblog: How important is the “agentless” piece of your solution? What benefit does this give users?
Ravhon: Super important! Modern DevOps teams take much pride in their setups — and they should. Installing 3rd party agents into their clusters is a very intrusive action. What’s worse is that teams often already have a monitoring solution in place, such as Datadog or Prometheus, that they manage, and installing a duplicated agent is just an overload.
VMblog: How hard is it for Finout to build dedicated solutions for each new cloud provider, service, or 3rd party SaaS? With all of the various tools out there how does Finout prioritize what to build integrations for?
Ravhon: Finout’s Megalbill was designed to be extensible from Day 1. Adding new tools into it can be a matter of hours depending on the cost maturity of the vendor we analyze.
VMblog: This announcement is coming out at a good time right before KubeCon EU. Do you believe we’ll see more conversations centered around FinOps and cost management this year given the current economic climate?
Ravhon: From one KubeCon to another, we see a massive increase in FinOps interest from both attendees and sponsoring vendors. I’m sure that cost management will be on most attendees’ list of things to check out on their trip. 2023 may be a tough year for many companies, and proper cost management can help keep engineers innovating while also keeping the CFO happy.
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