If you are looking to account for your container costs and understand how your AWS Kubernetes or EKS cluster spend maps onto your workloads, this guide was made for you! In this post we will walk through the steps to get up and running with CloudZero and Amazon Container Insights fast. CloudZero has integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for its strength as a secure and automated solution for sharing container metrics within AWS.

If cost optimization is your only reason for adopting Kubernetes and containers, you might be in for a rude surprise — many companies find that costs increase after moving to Kubernetes. Even companies who adopt Kubernetes for other reasons, like time-to-market advantages, should follow basic cost control best practices to stay within the budget.

One of the mistakes organizations make related to Kubernetes costs is addressing them primarily after-the-fact, once the application is running successfully. There are certainly changes that can be made to improve efficiency once the application is running, but cost-control measures are best considered at the beginning, not middle or end, of the application lifecycle.

When organizations think about the relationship between Kubernetes and cloud costs, they often focus on Kubernetes’ auto-scaling capabilities and what this means for optimizing compute resources. Kubernetes does allow organizations to provision compute resources more thinly, because the platform allows them to scale up automatically if there’s a demand spike in the middle of the night.

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.