Investigating Cloud Cost Anomalies for Kubernetes The Easy Way
Tags: cloud, kubernetes, devops
Published: 2022-10-14 09:00:16

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<p>You lead an engineering team and just received a bill from the FinOps manager asking why the cloud services your team uses cost so much. <strong>What ended up costing you more than expected? </strong>If you use Kubernetes, here’s how you can find any cloud cost anomalies in three simple steps.</p>
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<h2 id="h-step-1-analyze-your-cloud-bill-for-the-last-month">Step 1: Analyze your cloud bill for the last month</h2>
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<p>Take a look at your cloud bill from the last month, and you’ll instantly see why it’s so <a href="https://cast.ai/blog/how-to-solve-the-costliest-cloud-bill-issues/">hard to understand</a>. Cloud providers charge on the basis of various service metrics. For example, some resources in the AWS Simple Storage Service charge by the number of requests, while others use GB.</p>
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<p>To make sense of your usage and costs, you must look into various areas in your provider console. You can then group and report on costs by certain attributes - for example, group resources by region or service.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>However, a manual cloud bill analysis is time-consuming and relies on a lot of manual work. Now imagine that you’re managing more than one team using the same cloud service - you’ll have to repeat this analysis for every team!</p>
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<p>Or you can use a third-party cost monitoring solution that gives you all the insights you need in one place.</p>
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<h2 id="h-step-2-check-your-daily-cloud-expenses-to-identify-any-spikes">Step 2: Check your daily cloud expenses to identify any spikes&nbsp;</h2>
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<p>Take a look at a daily cost report like this one outlining how much your team spent each day:</p>
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<div class="lottie-animation" data-path="https://cast.ai/lottie-animations/cloud-cost-visibility.json" data-autoplay="" data-loop="" data-renderer="svg" id="cloud-cost-vibility"></div>
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<p>A single glance may be enough to <strong>identify outliers or cost spikes</strong> in your usage or expenses.</p>
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<p>Having this report handy every day of the month also helps to <strong>measure your burn rate</strong> and check whether your current spend is compatible with your monthly budget by extrapolating your daily expenses into a monthly bill.</p>
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<h2 id="h-step-3-check-historical-allocation-data-for-cloud-cost-anomalies">Step 3: Check historical allocation data for cloud cost anomalies</h2>
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<p>At this point, you might have noticed that your costs were running unusually high for a few days. It’s time to investigate the culprit. This is where historical cost allocation comes in.</p>
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<figure class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/jbJA9v50UrWDSJNEVTNGQdK7-Su9EXsK6hJCVNN0RW6xUn8GypGAgkjZF83kb-SSO93-boj5yHUKCyXu04EA7tzgK4gvgQwdf3AWfdz0i3VHLcnz2TvqbvObnqvkkqNkjtGKv9mWdxFU0arupd1Eh5V8iQzfF1TwG4keTRTs5AOK408dd7v5lrIt9A" alt=""/></figure>
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<p>This report is your point of departure for asking the following questions and checking specific <a href="https://cast.ai/blog/kubernetes-cost-monitoring-3-metrics-you-need-to-track-asap/">cloud cost metrics</a>:&nbsp;</p>
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<p><strong>1. Total cluster cost report</strong> - What is your projected monthly spend compared to last month's spend? What is the difference between this and previous month?</p>
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<p><strong>2. Allocation by workload</strong> - Are there any idle workloads that aren’t doing anything apart from burning your money?</p>
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<p><strong>3. Allocation by namespace </strong>- What was the distribution between the namespaces in terms of dollar spend?</p>
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<p>By the end of this process, you’ll arrive at the answer. You’ll know what happened last month that drove your costs up, whether it’s a service left running over the weekend or a specific team that picked a particularly pricy virtual machine.</p>
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<h2 id="h-investigating-cloud-cost-anomalies-doesn-t-have-to-take-hours-or-days">Investigating cloud cost anomalies doesn’t have to take hours or days</h2>
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<p>In a recent survey, engineers said that cloud cost issues caused disruptions to their work that last from a few hours per week (41%) to an entire sprint or more (11%).<sup>1</sup></p>
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<p>But <a href="https://cast.ai/blog/why-investigating-a-cloud-cost-issue-doesnt-have-to-take-hours-or-days/">investigating a cloud cost issue</a> doesn’t have to take hours or days. If you have access to all the reports I mentioned, you can <strong>keep your engineers productive and happy</strong> by not constantly being distracted by cost problems.</p>
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<p>The CAST AI cost monitoring module makes your cloud bill understandable, serving you all the most important cloud cost metrics to make cost analysis quick and easy.</p>
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<h5 id="h-cast-ai-clients-save-an-average-of-63-on-their-kubernetes-bills">CAST AI clients <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-cast-green-color">save an average of 63%</mark> on their Kubernetes bills</h5>


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