The growing challenge: accurately allocating and distributing containerized and Kubernetes costs

As containerization continues to become more mainstream, organizations now see a rising percentage of their EC2 spend attributed to containers and Kubernetes. With the shared, containerized platform infrastructure growing in popularity, platform teams feel a new burden to return usage costs driven by internal consumers back to their rightful owners.

Unfortunately, they lack the visibility needed to break down actual cost into granular ownership by team or application. Even though a large portion of total cloud spend is on containerized infrastructure, allocating containers and Kubernetes cost remains a challenge.

Challenges

• Lack of granular visibility into the true costs of containerized workloads
• No ability to break down actual costs into accurate allocation / ownership by team or application
• Teams’ inadequate awareness and responsibility add to overall cost-inefficiency

Benefits

• Unified, single-pane view of both container and non-container workloads makes true costs visible
• Containerized platform costs are distributed to rightful team owners for optimal efficiency
• Automated tagging for dynamic workloads ensures accurate cost allocation

Cloud provider-managed services and homegrown Kubernetes add complexity

Today’s infrastructure may span cloud provider-managed services like ECS, EKS and AKS, in addition to homegrown Kubernetes solutions, raising complexity even further. Limited visibility results in misplaced attention to shared service costs; consequently, individual teams lack cost awareness and responsibility.

Some organizations, frustrated with their inability to break down multi-tenant cluster costs, try to create independent clusters for each internal customer they support. But this approach significantly reduces the time- and costefficiencies of their original multi-tenant platform!

Gain an ideal, unified view of both container and non-container workloads for accurate allocation

Now, Yotascale’s container cost allocation feature offers a comprehensive, near real-time, unified view of both container and non-container workloads, all displayed within each user’s business context. Yotascale provides unprecedented deep support for containers, along with granular cost reporting that native tools cannot deliver. Automated tagging / labeling for these dynamic workloads introduces a whole new standard of accuracy in allocating costs.

“I consider Yotascale to be a pioneer in cloud cost management for modern architectures like Kubernetes, containers, and micro-services. Their speed of innovation is impressive and has been instrumental in empowering our engineering teams to own their infrastructure costs.”

Kartik Garg, Director of Platform Engineering, Hulu

Combine key metrics with accurate instance costs for precise per-team costs

Yotascale’s container cost allocation capabilities allow organizations to specify a key for breaking down multi-tenant clusters (like Docker labels or Kubernetes namespaces). This delivers complete, fair, and accurate showback to teams using the clusters. They can now divide container infrastructure costs based on reserved or utilized resources—whichever is higher.

This ability to granularly decompose multi-tenant cluster costs, works neatly with Yotascale’s business contexts feature. This enables you to combine finegrained, per-team platform usage costs with traditional cloud infrastructure like instance, database, and network costs for a complete picture of each team’s infrastructure expense.

Discover unutilized resources and prevent overprovisioning

Assignment of costs back to the teams that are driving them also enables visibility into unutilized portions of the platform. This visibility provides vital clarity to the platform team on the variables they control. Now they can clearly see potential overprovisioning, which offers ultimate transparency in cost ownership as well as optimization opportunities.

Visibility into granular platform usage costs, along with instance, database, and network costs, offers a complete picture of each team’s infrastructure expense.