Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Chapter 23. FinOps for the Container World

To support the adoption of microservice architectures, containers have gained popularity. Over the last few years, the number of container environments being run by organizations has rapidly increased. Managing a single running container instance is quite simple, but running hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of containers across many server instances becomes difficult. Thus, along came orchestration solutions like Kubernetes, which enable DevOps teams to maintain the configuration and orchestrate the deployment and management of fleets of containers.

Since containers and container orchestrators are becoming a popular choice for many teams, it’s vital to understand the fundamental impact of these containerized workloads on FinOps practices.

The most important reason this impacts FinOps so much is that most container environments are complex shared environments. Shared resources like containers—which run on shared cloud compute instances—cause challenges with cost allocation, cost visibility, and resource optimization. In the containerized world, traditional FinOps cost allocation doesn’t work the way it does with just virtual machines (VMs). You can’t simply allocate the cost of a resource to a tag or label, because each cloud or on-premises resource may be running a constantly shifting set of multiple containers, each supporting a different application. They also may be attached to different cost centers around the organization. ...