Managing Kubernetes Costs in a Multi-Cloud Environment

What is a multi-cloud environment?

Multi-cloud deployments are expanding rapidly. HashiCorp’s recent 2024 State of Cloud Strategy Survey showed that 62% of organizations have adopted a multi-cloud computing strategy to meet their business goals, while Flexera’s 2024 Cloud Survey indicated a full 89% of surveyed senior cloud decision makers are utilizing more than one public cloud provider. While polling stats may vary from report to report, it’s clear that a majority of organizations leveraging the cloud are doing so with more than just a single cloud provider. In a multi-cloud environment, organizations use two or more cloud providers at the same time to run applications. In doing so, these teams have more levers and knobs to address challenges around cost, reliability, disaster recovery, and other top concerns.

Multi-cloud environments can include both public and private clouds, which can vary depending on the needs or the goals of an organization. Modern organizations often implement a multi-cloud strategy that involves a number of different cloud service providers, and in many cases also include a hybrid approach with some on-premise infrastructure. It’s becoming the norm to see hybrid multi-cloud environments leveraged to satisfy modern cost, performance, and privacy or security goals.

As more Agile and DevOps oriented organizations make the move to a multi-cloud architecture, there is a corresponding increase in multi-cloud use of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a good option for hybrid and multi-cloud containerization management, providing a common architecture and framework for orchestrating containers in an environment-agnostic manner. Kubernetes is easy to deploy, regardless of the cloud environment used, and with key benefits of flexibility, efficiency and scalability, Kubernetes is particularly well suited as an enabler of multi-cloud benefits, while easing the challenges of adding a hybrid, on-prem component to further reduce costs and increase privacy and security controls.

Benefits of a multi-cloud approach

Organizations can leverage a range of benefits when adopting a multi-cloud approach. According to the HashiCorp study, “The most-cited reasons for cloud strategy were security (81%), scaling (75%), availability (75%), and costs (74%)”. Organizations surveyed were nearly unanimous in agreement (90%) that executing a solid cloud strategy has helped them achieve their overall business goals.

A multi-cloud approach gives organizations benefits of flexibility and versatility in choosing cloud providers, not just once, but as needed depending on factors like security, cost, technology, and performance. Organizations utilizing multi-cloud can be agile and migrate apps, services, and infrastructure rapidly from one provider to the next as dynamic forces may dictate. In addition, a multi-cloud strategy is often aimed at optimizing the workloads in each cloud environment, resulting in higher efficiencies and lower costs. As maturity levels increase, more enterprises are recognizing and reaping the advantages of operating in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment. With a multi-cloud infrastructure, organizations aren’t tied to one cloud service provider, they can spread their utilization, budgets, and risk around to maximize the business outcomes of their investments.

Multi-cloud advantages include:

• Improved disaster recovery with more availability. When applications run on multi-cloud environments, there is a significantly reduced risk of “single point of failure.” Applications are unlikely to go down simultaneously, and traffic can be shifted between service providers. This creates a better option for disaster recovery and mitigates the traditional cloud risk of a single point of failure.
• Improved security with a multilayered security approach. Organizations can use a multi-cloud approach for security to protect data in the cloud. Security in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments can include layers such as data encryption, hard tenancy and access segmentation, and principles of least privilege and Zero-trust security models.
• Greater ability to meet specific compliance requirements, or data residency requirements. For example, managing workloads in different regions to meet GDPR or other data handling and storage compliance requirements, may require multiple cloud providers to assure data protection aligned with CSP strengths or weaknesses.
• Greater flexibility for cost optimization and selection of services by cloud provider, and the ability to choose “best fit” cloud services for cost savings on a case-by-case basis. Companies can move applications and services as needed for optimization.
• Fulfilling data management needs of an enterprise organization—i.e., managing workloads in different regions to meet GDPR compliance requirements. This extends to all data, not just customer or internal data protection needs.
• Meeting an organization’s varying needs to operate with multiple cloud providers. Different business units in one organization may need different providers for many reasons. One unit may find Google Cloud Platform serves their needs better, while another may use Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure for specific business or technical reasons.

Cost monitoring of multi-cloud and hybrid Kubernetes is complex

Monitoring and managing costs in a multi-cloud environment can come with challenges. However, add in Kubernetes and things can become overwhelmingly difficult when it comes to understanding where your costs are coming from, optimizing requests and utilization to maximize efficiency, and mapping the granular costs back to things like teams, products, cost-centers, or projects. In every way cloud cost management of multi-cloud Kubernetes is far more difficult than when using a single cloud deployment.

When leveraging Kubernetes across multiple, separate systems and environments, tracking cloud costs requires specialized tools to handle the subtle differences from one CSP to the next. Costs involved for each cloud provider can vary widely, and each cloud vendor may require different skill sets and resources across engineering teams in order to effectively deploy and manage resources. In many cases, applications can span across multiple computing services, and calculating the costs for these applications is nearly impossible to conduct manually or via spreadsheets when multiple public and private environments are introduced, which is how many organizations attempt to manage their Kubernetes costs to this day.

Furthermore, running workloads across multiple computing services can ramp up costs quickly. Have you noticed your cloud spend continues to grow without obvious drivers? As workloads scale, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve cost visibility, and it becomes increasingly likely that workloads and resources lose efficiency or become orphaned over time. Cloud costs can exponentially increase with so many variables involved and it can become both time consuming and frustrating to attempt reducing them without solutions designed for the task of multi-cloud Kubernetes cost optimization.

Choosing an automated solution for managing and monitoring cloud costs provides the visibility necessary for managing a multi-cloud strategy. Hunt and peck approaches to reducing Kubernetes costs in multi-cloud environments often lead to stability and reliability issues, preventable outages, and focusing valuable skilled resources on tasks that may not actually move the cost savings meter meaningfully.

Benefits of Kubecost

Kubecost provides real-time cost visibility and insights for teams using Kubernetes, helping teams continuously reduce cloud costs. With Kubecost, your team can gain visibility into unified cost monitoring across all native Kubernetes concepts, including namespace, deployment, service, and more. Join in-cluster costs like CPU and memory, with out-of-cluster spend from cloud infrastructure services for complete cost visibility. Kubecost supports clusters across all major cloud providers like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and on-prem. Kubecost also offers optimization insights and real time alerting capabilities for teams.

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