CNCF Survey: Half of Organizations Spend More with Kubernetes, Mostly Due to Overprovisioning

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CNCF published the results of its latest microsurvey report on cloud-native FinOps and cloud financial management (CFM). Kubernetes has driven cloud spending up for 49% of respondents, while 28% stated their costs remain unchanged and 24% saved after migrating to Kubernetes. Respondents listed overprovisioning, lack of awareness and responsibility, and sprawl as the main factors for overspending.

The survey asked respondents to provide details on their Kubernetes spending as well as the overall cloud infrastructure costs. Additionally, the microsurvey enquired about companies’ overall FinOps journey and their steps to reign in the infrastructure spend associated with running Kubernetes.

The survey participants shared their views on why running Kubernetes can get quite expensive. The main reason for overspending was overprovisioning (70%), accompanied by the sprawl of resources not being deactivated after use (43%). The second cluster of responses was related to the lack of visibility and insight into consumption and spending (40%) and the lack of awareness and responsibility at the individual and team levels (45%). Technical debt related to not re-architecting workloads migrated into the cloud environment for scalability accounted for 43% of the overspending. Further down, the respondents pointed to resource-hungry workloads (25%), fluctuating consumption demands (23%), and poor planning/prediction of cloud consumption (20%).

The Kubernetes Overspend Survey Responses (Source: CNCF Blog)

Respondents shared that they see team and individual awareness and self-discipline as the best ways to help get the overspend under control (68%), followed by improved collaboration and communication (58%), implementing best practices (58%) and standardized tools (48%), and finally, executive-level leadership on cost control (50%).

When asked about the tools used for expenditure tracking and reporting, the respondents pointed mainly to cloud platform providers: AWS Cost Explorer (55%), GCP Cost Tools (28%), and Azure Cost Management (23%). The second group consisted of open-source and commercial tools: Kubecost (23%), OpenCost (11%), Datadog (11%), and CloudCustodian (6%). Finally, 9% admitted they use spreadsheets, and 11% another home-grown tool.

Companies that participated in the survey shared that Kubernetes accounts for a substantial percentage of their cloud expenditure. 28% of respondents reported that Kubernetes constituted 25-50% of their cloud costs, further 10% attributed 51-75% of the expenses to it, and lastly, 5% of companies spend 75-100% of their cloud spending on Kubernetes. In monetary terms, 22% of respondents said they pay over $ 1$ million per month for cloud infrastructure. On the other end of the spectrum, 21% reported their cloud spending to be below 10ドルk per month.

The FinOps Journey Survey Responses (Source: CNCF Blog)

Most responders admitted they either haven’t yet started their FinOps journey (10%) or are in the early stages, either evaluating/researching (35%) or piloting processes and tools (10%). Only 20% stated that they managed to operationalize the overall FinOps space and can actively monitor and report their cloud consumption and spending and make ongoing improvements to reduce costs. The other 18% shared they made some steps to start generating insights about what the money goes toward and achieved some initial gains.

InfoQ previously reported about the State of FinOps survey report, published by the FinOps Foundation, and the predicted impact of the FinOps movement on the observability space in 2024.

Related Topics:

• Development
• DevOps
• AWS
• Infrastructure
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation
• Google Cloud Platform
• Microsoft Azure
• Kubernetes
• Budgets
• Cost Optimization
• Monitoring
• Cloud Native Architecture
• Cost Savings
• Cloud

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