Clik here to view.
At KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2024, Kubecost launched its namesake version 2.0 of its FinOps application with new features that make it easier for teams to monitor and optimize infrastructure costs at scale.
What’s particularly of note, however, is how Kubecost 2.2 is empowering organizations to work on reducing their carbon footprint.
Bringing Sustainability to the Forefront of Cloud Operations
They call it the Carbon Cost Monitoring feature.
Enabled by the underlying OpenCost project (the open source, community-led specification and cost model), Kubecost’s Carbon Cost Monitoring feature enables organizations to conduct energy audits and then compare financial and environmental costs across different business cost centers, e.g., different departments or applications. In turn, this information helps teams make more informed decisions so they can take steps to reduce their carbon footprint.
Clik here to view.
Kubecost logo
Beyond the sustainability factor, Carbon Cost Monitoring also delivers a boost in the way of cost savings by helping organizations reduce their energy consumption and, thereby, energy spending.
Clearly, maximizing cost savings is always a priority — that goes without saying. But it’s only recently that sustainability has also started to climb its way to the top of IT teams’ priority lists.
And it’s about time.
Paying Attention to the Cloud’s Carbon Footprint Is Important — and Long Overdue
As of 2022, “the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of all carbon emissions,” reports MIT Press Reader. (Spoiler: That’s a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry.) In fact, altogether, the world’s data centers consume more energy than some nation-states.
And by 2025, some experts predict that data centers hosting cloud services could be responsible for up to 5.5% of global carbon emissions, as published in the Journal of Software: Practice and Experience. These environmental impacts of cloud computing are largely due to the mounting use (and environmental consequences) of generative AI.
So why aren’t more organizations tuned into their cloud’s carbon footprint?
It looks like the tides are slowly turning.
Little by little, organizations are starting to pay more attention to the environmental consequences of the cloud, with some industry leaders even dubbing the issue GreenOps, à la FinOps. But although industry attention is growing, sustainability is still lagging behind other optimization priorities — most notably, cost.
But Sustainability Still Comes Second to Cost Savings
The newly released Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report points out just how far behind sustainability is in the eyes of most IT teams.
But the picture isn’t all so doom and gloom. To start, it’s a good sign that 48% of all respondents say they “already have defined sustainability initiatives, including tracking the carbon footprint of cloud usage.”
Just because sustainability initiatives are in place, however, doesn’t mean they’re a main focus: While 29% of respondents said both cloud cost optimization and sustainability are equally prioritized, only 8% said they’re prioritizing sustainability and reducing carbon footprint — while 59% heralded cloud cost optimization as a priority.
It’s worth noting that the outlook is a little rosier across the pond.
When polling just European organizations, the same Flexera report found that 56% of organizations have defined sustainability initiatives — compared to just 48% of global organizations.
Perhaps this is due in part to new legislative pressure in the European Union (EU), such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), “which requires EU and non-EU companies with activities in the EU to file annual sustainability reports alongside their financial statements.” These reports, moreover, must be in accordance with European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
Until this kind of legislation becomes more mainstream, it’s up to individual organizations to take steps to prioritize sustainability in the cloud and deploy new protocols to reduce their carbon footprint.
With its new Carbon Cost Monitoring feature, Kubecost, for its part, is making a difference in empowering IT teams to achieve their sustainability goals more quickly and thoroughly via energy audits and advanced cost monitoring.
More Ways to Optimize with Kubecost 2.2
Beyond new support for sustainability initiatives, Kubecost promises further capabilities for cloud cost monitoring and optimization at scale with its 2.2 release.
Also announced in Paris, Kubecost now provides unified cloud cost monitoring to help organizations observe and optimize cloud, Kubernetes (K8s), and Datadog costs all in one place with its Datadog Cost Monitoring feature.
By directly integrating Datadog cost data, Kubecost 2.2 gives organizations real-time, granular visibility into both usage and costs for a unified view of infrastructure spending, enabling developers, FinOps, and platform engineering teams to make smarter, faster decisions and streamline operations.
The new iteration also delivers automated disk scaling through a standalone open source repository.
Specifically designed to support DevOps teams and K8s administrators, Desk AutoScaler dynamically adjusts disk size based on EBS persistent volume utilization to ensure always optimal utilization sans any manual intervention. Kubecost says this can translate to significant cost savings (usually 50% or more), reduced implementation time, and less complexity.
Monitoring, managing, and optimizing different pieces of the cloud is a challenging juggling act. New features from Kubecost 2.2 make it easier for teams to balance it all — and help give sustainability initiatives the extra attention they deserve.
The post Kubecost 2.2 Covers Carbon Cost Monitoring (and More) appeared first on The New Stack.
New features of Kubecost 2.2 can help IT teams reduce their carbon footprint and meet sustainability goals.