- Every year about $10 million is lost in cloud spend according to a cost analysis report.
- Kubecost solves this problem by maximizing the efficiency of cloud spend.
About 26% of enterprises with over 1000 employees shelled out over $6 million a year in the public cloud. But according to an estimate, a fair amount of that enterprise cloud spend goes to waste. A similar report found that the average waste cost 35% which came out to $10 billion each year across Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Kubecost claims to solve the problem by maximizing the efficiency of cloud spend. Originally launched as an open-source project by ex-Google Cloud Platform engineers in 2019, the startup offers free and paid services for handling the infrastructure deployment and providing recommendations for the reduction of the spend.
The startup breaks down the infrastructure costs which it tracks down and optimizes insights that suggest where a company can decrease the spend without sacrificing the performance. It has deployed on in-house infrastructure and doesn’t egress any data, according to the company’s CEO Web Brown.
Brown and Ajay Tripathy founded Kubecost. “He and I felt inspired to create the Kubecost open source project in early 2019 as we saw engineering teams migrating to Kubernetes struggling with [fundamental] challenges. This open-source project gave developers visibility into their Kubernetes spend by application, teams, project, microservice, and more. Demand was so strong for a cost monitoring tool purpose-built for Kubernetes that we ended up founding the company.”
Kubecost’s integration with cloud billing API:
Kubecost directly forms integration with cloud billing API to provide a window into how they spend the resources across clusters. It shows the cost of resources that individual apps consume and teams. It allows the users to assign assets like database and storage buckets to two teams, product services, and other native concepts. With Kubecost, managers can monitor the capacity to avoid performance degradation and app failures. They can analyze the existing configuration and resource utilization compared with others for enhanced reliability.
There is plenty of competition in the cloud spend management market. In January, Quali, a company that develops sandbox software for cloud and DevOps automation, raised $54 million. Their cloud management software provider Ivalua recently managed to raise $60 million and reached a $1 billion valuation. But according to Brown, the teams from over a thousand companies which include EA, Broadcom, Adobe, Equifax, and Siemens already use the Kubecost platform, which grew the revenue to over 7 times last year.
First-round capital led the seed round in Kubecost. It saw the participation from Afore Capital along with Chris Aniszczyk, Andrew Lee, David Lieb.
“Unchecked growth in expenses can be catastrophic where budgets need to be closely watched. Certain companies are paying careful attention to spend as a result of the pandemic. At the same time, we see companies accelerating their transition to the cloud and Kubernetes,” he added. “This is happening across all industries, from hospitality to retail to government. As more teams empower developers across the company to dynamically provision the resources they need, we see more teams becoming aware of the risks of not having cost monitoring and governance in place.”
