Kubecost K8s FinOps: How much is that Kubernetes in the window?

Kubecost is a company that specialises in monitoring and optimising Kubernetes spend.

That’s FinOps K8s management, but at scale.

The organisation has now added cloud cost support to the open source project, OpenCost – a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and allocating cloud infrastructure and container costs in real-time. 

Built by Kubernetes experts and supported by Kubernetes practitioners, OpenCost claims to ‘shine a light’ into the black box of Kubernetes spend.

This addition allows OpenCost to support accessing provider billing and cloud cost visibility beyond Kubernetes across AWS, Azure, and GCP — with support for more platforms to come.

OpenCost launched in 2022 with code donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) by Kubecost. OpenCost has provided valuable cost monitoring for users looking to get insight into a single cluster. 

Kubecost is now expanding OpenCost’s capabilities with budgeting, forecasting, alerting, and savings recommendations across multiple clusters and multiple clouds, as a key step toward adopting and implementing the FinOps Foundation’s FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS).

FinOps Foundation 

The OpenCost project has been closely aligned with FOCUS and will be an open source implementation of the FOCUS 1.0 specification. Supported by the FinOps Foundation and industry leaders, including Kubecost, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Accenture, FOCUS is a technical specification to build and maintain an open standard for cloud cost, usage, and billing data.

“OpenCost and Kubecost are committed to supporting FOCUS through our cloud cost for multi-cloud infrastructure functionality,” said Webb Brown, CEO and co-founder of Kubecost. “FOCUS is a new open approach to cloud cost monitoring. By implementing FOCUS, we believe we’ll further be able to make the lives of developers, engineers, FinOps and other technical personas that are hands-on managing infrastructure cost much more manageable.”

While many cloud cost tools are not built for use by developer teams, Kubecost has concentrated on delivering solutions that bring cost visibility and analysis to engineering, DevOps and other technical teams. 

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