It’s costly to run Kubernetes for the first time, especially when the setup is inefficient. However, proper Kubernetes implementation reduces maintenance costs organically. Below are six ways to reduce the cost of Kubernetes maintenance and deployment.
Use a Kubernetes engine
Running a Kubernetes engine such as this one is a productive way to reduce maintenance costs and significantly increase deployment speed. Kubernetes is crucial in automating deployment and scaling workloads and services.
Cost monitoring
Monitoring Kubernetes costs help you determine how much you saved. You can use cloud providers for basic cost monitoring. The public cloud provider billing shows the computing and network costs. However, that outline only gives you a simple understanding, which is not very important for multi-tenant clusters.
Start by optimizing the actual costs once you have Kubernetes cost monitoring.
Autoscaling
It’s time to focus on saving costs as you have set up cost monitoring to prevent cost explosions. First, you need to know the size of your clusters. Autoscaling allows you to allocate resources and automate several management tasks. Below are the two types of autoscaling.
- Horizontal. Horizontal autoscaling aims at updating a workload resource to match demand. It increases or decreases the number of pods.
- Vertical. With vertical autoscaling, it’s easy to adjust the CPU and set memory resources. In addition, vertical autoscaling help users compute the perfect size of resource requests.
Horizontal and vertical autoscaling is essential to adjust your computing resources, making it easy to meet your actual needs. However, autoscaling is not flawless as it may be too conservative for some users. Therefore, Autoscaling should be handled with care to avoid inflating cloud bills.
Utilizing sleep mode
Sometimes, clusters and namespaces create costs when they aren’t needed. Such cases are common when Kubernetes is used during development by engineers. For example, a developer only needs a Kubernetes development environment during office hours. Thus, developers can shut off the environment instead of using it all the time.
Most developers often forget to shut off the environment. You are advised to automate the environment using a sleep mode feature. Sleep mode seeks to reduce unused namespaces and clusters. With sleep mode, you can use the environment when you need it again.
Cluster sharing
Cluster sharing is a cost-saving approach that enables computing resources to be used by multiple users. Users will save cluster management fees when they use Google Cloud. Admins will easily manage different clusters when there is a low number of clusters.
Cleanup
You need to eliminate unused computing resources. You will have unnecessary namespaces if the developers create namespaces on demand. Sleep mode might not reduce the costs as it’s only designed for temporary resources. It’s better to expunge the Kubernetes environment instead of preserving it.
You can use loft, which has an auto-delete feature. By deleting some environments, implementing the system becomes easier for admins.
Wrap up
You are guaranteed a cost-optimized Kubernetes system when you utilize the above measures. Therefore, implement the cost-saving approaches and start using Kubernetes without fearing maintenance costs.
