Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report(theregister.com)

126 points by eminemence 5 years ago | 86 comments

moksly 5 years ago |

I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it.

The unpredictability of cost is actually the prime reason we stuck to our own cloud, where we rent (technically we buy the hardware that the company hosts, but it’s not really ours, we just use it till it breaks) the iron at a known rate. Which is just better for a public sector budget than paying by mileage, at least if anyone outside of the IT department bothers to look into what they are signing off on.

The really interesting part will be where we go from here. Moving from self-hosted to rented iron that we run our virtual servers on, was a fairly simple move that would be easy to reverse. The move into the cloud is even easier, but unless you’re careful, it could be very costly to get out.

bogota 5 years ago | |

Unfortunately AWS is the new oracle. No one ever gets in trouble for picking it and its a great way to make it look like you as a high up exec provide value. Look how fast we are iterating now with my decision. It almost always ends in a mess of unmaintainable unthought out services that someone else has to come and clean up or move to the next proprietary service.

The last 5 years for me has been soul crushing as someone who actually enjoys managing datacenters. We have seen time and time again having your own DC leads to much better visibility and control on spending as well as lower cost. Not to mention the huge advantage when negotiating with cloud vendors if you are a mid size or up company.

So time and time again i have had to transition out of environments you can reason about into AWS and become a glorified support engineer but i guess thats what companies need now days. Someone who will read docs the other engineers dont want to and troubleshoot all the issues because AWS is so easy.

Im glad I got to learn how the “cloud” works though as i likely never would have been drawn to infra and programming in this day and age.

Jochim 5 years ago | | |

The problem with running your own DC is growing past your planned capacity. There's often a huge delay between developers having to put up with the VM infrastructure having to put up with under-resourced machines and more capacity being approved.

As a developer I've put up with over-subscribed VMware clouds and I vastly prefer the Azure/AWS option.

thanatos519 5 years ago | | |

I recently experienced this firsthand, in a company which owned no computers beyond employee laptops. The product was entirely built of AWS services created by a pile of Terraform spaghetti. It was only really understood by someone whose superpower was the ability to keep an apparently unlimited number of levels of indirection in his head.

I hear they might need to move it all to Azure soon!

Retric 5 years ago | | |

Many people have been fired after AWS migrations resulted in massive cost increases. But, few people want to talk about failed projects at hospitals etc where the cloud is a poor fit.

IT has always had issues with people cargo cutting solutions without understanding the details, and the cloud is no different.

dan_quixote 5 years ago | |

Are those of us happy/comfortable with current major cloud offerings simply not speaking up here? I can't fathom running a data center any longer for a company of nearly any size. Given my team's responsibilities, this would require 2-3x more headcount with significantly worse SLA/SLO if we still ran our own datacenter. Maybe it's not such a big deal for places with constant demand? Or is this just a case of observer bias?

Agingcoder 5 years ago | | |

It depends on what you do.

Cloud boxes are insanely expensive (easily 10x the price of the equivalent in house box, taking hosting, power, cooling, hw into account).

To make this work, you need a combination of variable demand, and only paying for partial salaries (your cloud boxes are mutualized with other people's boxes).

If you're a reasonably big company (tens of thousands of servers) , with fairly stable demand, and adequate capacity planning, you won't necessarily save a huge amount of money by outsourcing your DCs. You can argue that the gcp/aws guys are better than you at running fleets of servers and data centers , but at 10x the price, it's worth double checking. If all I do is raw compute 100% of the time on a very large scale, it's extremely likely I want to do it myself.

Obviously, there's more than raw hardware to the cloud, starting with all kinds of managed services, which can be worth it. Again , you'll have to do the maths :10x for the boxes, then extra for the distributed db? Does it give me a competitive advantage? Better time to market?

In the end, there are good use cases, and bad use cases for the cloud, and I don't think it's as clear cut as what you say.

EDIT : if cloud hardware prices were not completely ridiculous (say 2x), then it might suddenly be a lot more compelling, and I would most likely agree with you (security / regulatory issues aside).

sleepybrett 5 years ago | |

When we pushed a bunch of teams at a large retailer from ec2 to kubernetes in ec2 (not eks) we reduced overall cloud spend by ~30%.

It's only unpredictable and unquantifiable if you don't look at it. Is the problem that they don't have the right tools to look at it yet?

twalla 5 years ago | | |

The flip side of this is I was able to reduce an employers cloud spend by 80 percent by just _fixing_ the mistakes they made when migrating to kubernetes. We were still on k8s afterwards, its just that the first pass made a bunch naive assumptions and poor optimizations.

reedciccio 5 years ago | |

Renting the hardware is not necessarily a cost-saving measure though: how much of the compute/storage capacity you have is sitting idle in your datacenter? That's the whole point of finops: you need to have full visibility into the usage of your infrastructure so you can optimize the spend.

wffurr 5 years ago | | |

OP didn't say anything about cost saving but rather predictability.

joana035 5 years ago | | |

Gosh, there is job title for capacity planning?

funcDropShadow 5 years ago | | |

It is not necessarily a cost-saving measure, but it can be in some cases. In a project I was involved with, we came to the conclusion that we would pay AWS every three month the cost of the hardware that we would by ourselfs. I am aware that AWS includes hosting and services. Nevertheless that is a very big difference.

tomc1985 5 years ago | | |

Still amazing to me that keeping capacity in reserve is now demonized

tyingq 5 years ago |

"Less than 25 per cent of those surveyed said they could accurately predict how much they’d spend on Kubernetes to within 5 per cent of actual cost."

The premise seems off to me. Of course people have a hard time predicting the cost of an autoscaling infrastructure that they haven't had for a long time.

Presumably they moved off of a fixed size infrastructure to get to Kubernetes. Where they were either paying for excess capacity on some days, or paying in the form of poor performance when demand exceeded supply.

Five percent accuracy seems like a high bar, and you would want a year or two to understand your seasonality and growth rate, etc.

Decker87 5 years ago | |

Geez, We can barely predict anything within 5%.

WYepQ4dNnG 5 years ago |

I have experienced first hand several cases of k8s gone wrong. In the end I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't really need the complexity of k8s.

Seriously, most k8s projects I have been involved with required so much effort to bootstrap and keep it going, it just blew me away! The experience for the average developer was just frustrating and infuriating: AWS ECS to the rescue!

Some will argue: vendor lock in! Really? I bet most services out there are already vendor locked in, just go with the flow and make your life easier.

I have seen companies failing because investing so much in building infrastructure, supposly vendor lock in free (or so they thought) that they lost sight and did not invest enough building the actual product: no revenue -> party is over.

Don't make the same mistake.

frompdx 5 years ago |

The headline seems a bit hyperbolic after reading the article. The bar chart has the caption Accurate prediction of Kubernetes costs is a challenge. However, the chart shows that one in five respondents represented in the data don't bother to predict their costs at all. Over half can predict within 10%, which seems fairly reasonable even if there is room for improvement. That leaves the remaining 20% who really are struggling to accurately predict their costs with better accuracy than 25%.

The trouble with all of this is that it doesn't really account for how the respondents use Kubernetes. What type of workloads are they running and how variable are those workloads? Would the organizations struggling to predict costs still struggle using another solution if their workloads are highly variable? Are they trading fixed costs for scalability in the face of those variable workloads? It's certainly possible to set upper bounds to autoscaling and to run fixed sized workloads in Kubernetes.

Perhaps the best takeaway from the article is that there is an opportunity to develop better cost management tools or offer consulting services in this domain. I know there are a few companies out there hoping to offer services in this space already.

gnivol 5 years ago |

This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up.

Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"

punkrex 5 years ago |

A lot of the “finops” practitioners I’ve seen are myopically focused on tagging of AWS resources; and that falls to pieces with kubernetes because AWS can’t see inside the kubernetes clusters.

I’m not surprised they don’t like it.

sleepybrett 5 years ago | |

I just had a meeting with a 'finops' manager where i showed him how kubernetes has a similar tagging structure (labels) and how we can break down per team pricing based on cpu/memory utilization.

It's not hard, you just need the tools (kubecost, etc)

cobookman 5 years ago | | |

pod A uses 2 cores, pod B uses 1 core. Machine has 4 cores and all remaining unscheduled pods require 2 cores.

How do you attribute the partial usage of the node? Is it 2 cores billed to pod A, 1 core billed to pod B, and 1 core billed to some random team?

Or do you have 2/3 of Node billed to pod A and 1/3 of Node billed to Pod B.

Now deal with this permutation across all the various variables.

cogman10 5 years ago | |

Yup. Particularly because k8s scales based on whole system load, not single app load. It's harder to predict because it's better at optimizing resource utilization and ultimately lowering costs.

briffle 5 years ago | | |

You can scale load on many things in more recent versions of K8s. for example, pubsub depth of un-acked messages, or custom metrics in prometheus format.

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/tutorials/au...

alongub 5 years ago |

I wrote a tool that helps estimate K8s costs by simulating K8s clusters. You write your pods in a simple DSL and it runs kube-scheduler without actual nodes behind the scenes.

It's still really basic but I'd love to hear your feedback!

https://github.com/aporia-ai/kubesurvival

frompdx 5 years ago | |

I think this is a great idea. I can see the DSL being very useful for situations where you want to think about hypotheticals. My main piece of feedback is that you should consider supporting the ability to feed in your existing k8s manifests as input to this tool instead in addition to the DSL. I think that would make this tool very appealing and very easy to onboard users with existing clusters who are looking to reduce their costs.

alongub 5 years ago | | |

For sure, this is definitely planned!

mplewis 5 years ago |

I mean, what did anyone think the cloud was? This isn't news.

Sparkyte 5 years ago |

This article is written from the perspective of companies that failed to plan for kubernetes and just used it willie nillie. So... pointless.

avereveard 5 years ago |

Kubernetes will happily run without autoscaling. This article is barking at the wrong tree.

jrockway 5 years ago | |

I am pretty sure that Kubernetes is just a buzzword they included to get clicks. You can definitely spend money in the cloud using Kubernetes or not using Kubernetes, and in the Kubernetes case, disabling node autoscaling doesn't eliminate the ability to spend money by submitting an API object. The article mentions PVs (which will be auto-provisioned whenever you request one; this feature is so core to Kubernetes that it works without effort even if you aren't using the cloud provider's managed Kubernetes offering) and cloud storage (write a byte, now you're spending money to store that byte), and it's right -- those things cost money and make spend unpredictable. But, it really has nothing to do with Kubernetes. They may have well as said "using Intel CPUs makes cloud spend unpredictable", because Intel CPUs are capable of executing instructions that call APIs to spend money in the cloud. Technically true, but kind of grasping at straws.

deknos 5 years ago |

i've seen enough installations that this is not the fault of kubernetes, but that they think this should work automatically. this has to be implemented to count as well.

crmd 5 years ago |

As opposed to the annual corporate VMWare enterprise license shock and awe ritual we go through every year. Infrastructure platforms are wicked expensive.

danudey 5 years ago | |

We have the best of both worlds: we're migrating to k8s, but on ESXi just because.

StratusBen 5 years ago |

Disclaimer: I'm Co-Founder and CEO at https://vantage.sh/ - a cloud cost transparency platform.

We have been hearing this a lot from our customers who use EKS. They are running single clusters as shared infrastructure so have no insight into which workloads are contributing the most costs. This is true with other shared infra like data pipelines.

We are currently working on a solution for pod-level cost insights if anyone is interested in signing up for the beta shoot an email to ben@vantage.sh

cyberge99 5 years ago |

Why does the graph have a legend when the only color is green?

tristor 5 years ago |

I think this headline is hyperbole, but also somewhat true, but not for any fault of Kubernetes. I've worked in this space extensively, and have been called in to consult in some variety or another on a number of large enterprise Kubernetes deployments. Nearly universally I found the following things to be true:

1. Companies had critical infrastructure for the success of Kubernetes owned by teams that opposed deploying Kubernetes

2. The primary person shepherding Kubernetes into the company's environment had not done their due diligence on what were appropriate workloads for Kubernetes and what were not and how applications would integrate across mixed environments when required.

3. The principal tech resources at the company were not educated about containerization, Kubernetes, and the intricacies of container networking but were on the hook internally for the implementation.

What ends up driving the "black hole of unpredictable spend" is that companies are sold (either internally or externally) on a relatively short migration timeframe, but that timeframe is contingent on the company having appropriate infrastructure, staffing, and no key persons internally blocking said migration. If any factor is out of whack the migration timeline can quickly approach infinite.

While it is true that there are startups that could run everything they need for their first 10k customers on 5 VMs w/ Nginx & MySQL that decide to build grandiose environments in Kubernetes they don't need. The opposite is also true, which is that there are huge enterprises who could in reality massively benefit from Kubernetes in their environment but for "political" reasons can't get it done even after spending millions of dollars, so are stuck mired in their "legacy" environments. Networking, in particular, is a huge barrier of entry for enterprise Kubernetes deployments and are almost always stymied by people, not technology, because most enterprises have some Boomer network admin who doesn't actually know anything about networking but only knows about Cisco gear running things.

So, what do companies do? They go to AWS or GCP and they just run up a /massive/ bill, as they very very slowly migrate (often rewrite) their legacy systems to the cloud. This is of course astronomically and unnecessarily expensive, but it's generally not the fault of the underlying technology. AWS and Google are happy to bilk major enterprises as well, and often sell them a bill of goods they can't deliver on.