Container costs are ... cloudy:
Traditional FinOps approaches to allocating costs of resources and charging them back to the right department struggle to cope with containerized workloads. This is significant because figures from the FinOps Foundation reveal that containers account for about 25% of corporate cloud spending. Teams share resources without transparent prices attached to workloads, while organizations increasingly run resources on disparate machine types and even across multiple cloud providers. Measuring costs in Kubernetes/container environments can be complex. For many IT teams the first hurdle is getting the information required to estimate costs and likely increases.
The 2022 FinOps Foundation survey found accurate forecasting of spending was the second most often cited pain point. The benefit of containers, and especially Kubernetes is that applications and their resource needs are dynamic – but this almost instant scalability means pricing needs to be done in real time too, not as a one-off procedure. The research carried out by the FinOps Foundation reveals the top challenges included accurate reporting of container costs, which is an issue for 30% of those questioned. Establishing and maintaining accurate metadata impacts 24% of the Foundation’s respondents, leading to issues of fair and accurate distribution of costs to different departments. The table below shows the main container related challenges respondents faced…