As multicloud deployments become increasingly common, cost control and management optimization have become major concerns for enterprises. To help organizations with these tasks, Kubecost gives them visibility into their Kubernetes solutions and identifies cost and infrastructure concerns, according to Webb Brown (pictured), co-founder of Kubecost.

“We absolutely see an evolution to just more and more automation and intelligence, but you have to think that cost is not an isolated variable,” Brown said. “Cost is very closely linked to reliability and performance, stability, all of these things. So you want to be really careful when you start handing this stuff over to an algorithm.”

Brown spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed Kubecost’s approach and expectations, as well as the challenges facing companies about cloud costs (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Standard to measure costs across different environments

Kubecost was built about a year ago by a team of ex-Google cloud engineers that came together after seeing the challenges of managing microservice-based infrastructure at scale. “Working in container orchestration environments, we saw this challenge where teams were finding kind of easy to let costs get away from them,” Brown said.

The project started with the goal of cost allocation between clouds. There is a lot of challenges for measuring the cost of CPU, RAM, storage, etc., according to Brown. “This project helps develop a uniform standard and library to measure costs across all different environments,” he said.

Frequent changes in those costs as new solutions are announced in the industry make monitoring challenging, Brown added. But Kubecost is designed to support this ever-evolving environment.

“We are constantly refreshing billing data, dynamically looking at wind pods, or jobs are coming up and going down, and in real time looking at the cost of the nodes that they’re actually running on — that is both the beauty and the challenge we face,” Brown stated.

There is no definite model as to who within a company should pay attention to these costs. “There are so many different models … but what we typically see is it’s someone from the finance org and someone from the DevOps org that is jointly caring about this,” Brown said. “We think that this is going to be continuing to evolve and change for the years to come.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: CNCF sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE