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>> Welcome to this CUBE conversation.
I'm Dave Nicholson,
and this is part of the AWS Startup Showcase season two.
I'm very happy to have with me Webb Brown, CEO of Kubecost.
Webb, welcome to the program.
How are you?
>> I'm doing great.
It's great to be here, Dave.
Thank you so much for having me.
Really excited for the discussion.
>> Good to see you.
I guess we saw each other last,
down in Los Angeles for KubeCon.
Right?
>> Exactly right.
Still feeling the energy from that event.
Hoping we can be back together in person,
not too long from now.
>> Yeah, well I'll second that.
Well, let's get straight to it.
Tell us about Kubecost.
What do you guys do?
And I think essential to that question is,
what gives you guys the right to exist?
What problem are you solving?
>> Yeah, I love the question.
So first and foremost Kubecost,
we provide costs monitoring and cost management solutions
for teams running Kubernetes or cloud native workloads.
Everything we do is built on open source.
Our founding team was working
on infrastructure monitoring solutions
at Google before this.
And what we saw was as we had several teammates join
the Kubernetes effort very early days at Google,
we saw teams really struggling even just to monitor
and understand Kubernetes costs.
There's lots of complexity with the Kubernetes scheduler
and being able to answer the question
of what is the cost of an application
or what is the cost of a team department, et cetera,
and the workloads that they're deploying.
It was really hard for most teams.
If you look at CNCF study from late last year,
still today, about two thirds of teams can't answer
where they are spending money.
And what we saw when digging in there is that
when you can't answer that question,
it's really hard to be efficient.
And by be efficient, we mean get the right balance
between cost and performance and reliability.
So we help teams in these areas and more,
where now have thousands of teams using our product.
We feel we're just getting started on our mission as well.
>> So when people hear it, when people think of Kubecost,
they naturally associate that with Kubernetes
and they think, well, Kubernetes is open source,
wait, isn't that free?
So what costs are you tracking exactly?
>> Yeah, great question.
We would track costs in any environment
where you can run Kubernetes.
So if that's on-prem,
you can bring a custom pricing sheet to monitor,
say the cost of your underlying CPU course,
GPUs, memory, et cetera.
If you're running in a cloud environment,
we have integrations with Azure, GCP and AWS,
where we would be able to reflect all the complexity
of whatever deployment you have,
whether you're using spot and multiple regions
where you have complex enterprise discounts,
RIs, savings plans,
you name it, we'd be reflecting it.
So it's really about not just generic prices,
it's about getting the right price for your organization.
>> So the infrastructure that goes into this calculation
can be on-premises or off-premises in the form of cloud.
I heard that, right?
>> Yeah, that's exactly right.
So all of those environments,
we'd give you visibility into all the resources
that your Kubernetes clusters are consuming.
Again, that's nodes, load balancers,
every resource that it's directly touching.
Also have the ability for you to pull in external costs.
So if you have Kubernetes tenants that are using S3
or Cloud SQL or another external cloud service,
we would make that connection for you.
And then lastly, if you have shared costs,.
Sometimes even like the cost of a DevOps team.
We'd give you the ability to kind of allocate
that back to your core infrastructure,
which may be used for showback or even chargeback
across your organization.
>> So who are the folks in an organization
that are tapping into this?
Are developers being encouraged to be cognizant
of these costs throughout the process,
or is this just sort of a CFO on down visibility too?
>> Yeah, it's a great question.
And what we see is a major transformation here
where kind of shift left from a cost perspective
where more and more engineering teams are interested
in just being aware or having transparency.
So they can build a culture of accountability with costs.
With the amazing ability to rapidly push to production
and iterate with microservices and Kubernetes,
it's hard to have this kind of,
just wait for say the finance team to review this
at the end of the month or the end of the quarter.
We see this increasingly being viewed in real time
by infrastructure teams, by engineering teams.
Now, finance is still a very important stakeholder
and absolutely has a very important seat at the table
in these conversations.
But increasingly, these are, again, real-time
or near real-time engineering decisions
that are really moving the needle on cost
and cost efficiency over time and performance as well.
>> Now, can you use this to model what costs might be,
or is this, you mentioned monitoring in real-time,
is this only for pulling information as it exists,
or could you do, could you use some of the aspects
of your toolset to make a decision,
whether something makes more sense to run
on your existing infrastructure on-premises
versus working in a cloud?
Is that's something that it's designed for or not?
>> Great question.
So we do have the ability to predict cost going forward,
based on everything we've learned about your environment,
whether you're in multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera.
So some really interesting functionality there
and a lot more coming later this year,
because we do see more and more teams
wanting to model those days of the future.
As you deploy really complex technologies,
like say the Cluster Autoscaler
or HPA in different environments,
it can be really challenging to do
an apples to apples comparison,
and we help teams do exactly that.
And again, going to have a lot more
interesting announcements here later this year.
>> So later this year, meaning not in the next few minutes
while we're together?
(laughs)
>> Nothing new to announce on that front today,
but I would say, expect later this quarter
for us to have more.
>> Okay, that sounds good.
Now, you touched on this a little bit,
but I want to hone in on,
on why this is particularly relevant now
and moving into the future?
We've always, tracking costs has always been important
even before the dawn of cloud,
but why is it increasingly important?
And there are alternatives for cost tracking,
legacy alternatives that are out there.
So talk about why it's particularly relevant now,
and tell us what your superpower is?
>> All right.
>> Secret sauce is something you can't share.
Super power you can talk about.
>> Absolutely.
>> Superpowers are on (indistinct).
>> Yes.
>> So why relevant?
What's your superpower?
>> Yeah, great questions.
So first and forward, just to touch on what's fundamentally
changing to make a company like ours impactful or relevant.
There's really three things here.
First and foremost is the new abstractions or complexities
that come with Kubernetes.
Super powerful, but from a cost standpoint,
make it considerably harder to accurately track costs.
And the big transformation here is,
with Kubernetes, you can, at any given moment
have 50 applications running
on a single node or a single VM.
You can fast forward five minutes
and there could be 50 entirely new applications.
So just assigning that VM or tagging that VM
back to an application or team or department
really is not relevant in most places.
So just the new complexity related to costs
makes this problem harder for teams.
Second is we touch on, just again, the power of Kubernetes
is the ability to allow distributed engineering teams
to work on many microservices concurrently.
So you're no longer in a lot of ways managing this problem
where they centralized single point of decision-making.
Oftentimes, these decisions are distributed across,
not only in your infrastructure team,
but your engineering team.
So just the way these decisions and innovation is happening
is changing how you manage these.
And lastly, it's just scale.
The cloud and Kubernetes continue
to be incredibly successful.
Where as Kubecost now managing billions of dollars,
as these numbers get bigger and bigger,
just becomes more of a business focus
and business critical issue.
So those are the three kind of underlying themes
that are changing.
When I talk about what we do that makes us special.
It's really this like foundational layer
of visibility that we built.
And what we can do is in real-time
with a very high degree of accuracy
at the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world,
give you visibility at any dimension.
And so from there, you can do things
like have real-time monitoring.
You can have real-time insights.
You can allow automation to make decisions
on these inputs or data feeds.
You can set alerts, you can set recurring reports.
All of these things are made possible
because of the, I would say really hard work that we've done
to, again, give this real-time visibility
with a high degree of accuracy at crazy scale.
>> So if we were to play little make-believe for a moment.
Pretend like I'm a skeptical sitting on the fence.
Not sure if I want to go down this path kind of person.
And I say, you know what, Webb,
I think I have a really good handle
on all of my costs so far.
What would you hit me with as an example of something
that people really didn't expect
until they were running Kubecost
and they actually had that visibility?
What are some of the things that people are surprised by?
>> Yeah, great question.
There'd be a number.
Number one, I'd have one data point I want to get from you,
which is for your organization or for all of your clusters,
what is your cost efficiency?
Can you answer that with a high degree of accuracy?
And by cost efficiency,
>> And the answer is now.
So tell me how to sign up for Kubecost.
>> Yeah, and so the answer.
>> Continue.
>> The answer there is you can go get our community version.
You can be up and running in minutes.
You don't have to share any data like it is,
you know, simply a helm install.
But cost efficiency is this notion of every dollar
that you are spending on provision resources.
What percentage of those dollars are you actually utilizing?
And we now have thousands of teams using our product
and we've worked with hundreds of them really closely.
That's not the entire market,
but in our large sample sizes,
we regularly see teams start in the low 20% cost efficiency,
meaning that approximately 80% is quote waste.
Time and time again,
we see teams just be shocked by this number.
And again, most of it is not because they were measuring it
inaccurately or anything like that.
Most teams, again today, still just don't have
that visibility until they start working with this.
>> So is that sort of the,
look, in my household,
certain members seem to only believe
that there is one position for a light switch,
and that would be the on position.
Is this a bit of a parallel where folks are spinning up
resources and then just out of sight, out of mind,
maybe not spinning them down when not needed?
>> Yeah, that's definitely one class of the challenges.
I would say, today if you look at our product,
we have 14 different insights across,
like different dimensions of your infrastructure.
One or I would say several of those relate
to exactly what you just described,
which is you spin up a VM,
you spin a bit load balancer,
you spin up an external IP address.
You're using it,
you're not paying for it.
Another class is this notion of, again,
I don't have an understanding of what my resources cost.
I also don't have a great sense for how much my microservice
or application will need.
So I'm just going to turn on all the light switches
or I'm going to drastically over-provision.
Again, I don't know the cost,
so I'm just going to set it and forget it.
And if my application is performing,
then we're doing well here.
Again, with this visibility, you can get much more specific,
much more accurate, much more actionable
with making that trade off.
Again, down to the individual pod, workload,
deployment, et cetera.
>> So we've, we've touched on this a bit peripherally,
but give me an example.
You run into someone
who happens to be a happy user of Kubecost.
What's the dream story that you love to hear from them
about what life was before Kubecost,
and what life was like after Kubecost?
>> Yeah, there's a lot of different dimensions there.
One is working with an infrastructure team
that used to get asked these questions a lot about,
why does this cost so much,
or why are we spending this in Kubernetes,
or why are expenses growing the rate that they are?
When this works, engineering teams or infrastructure teams
aren't getting asked those questions.
The tool, Kubecost itself is getting asked that
and answering that.
So I think one is infrastructure teams
not fielding those types of questions as much.
Secondly, is just more and more teams rolling this out
throughout their organization.
And ultimately, just getting,
building a culture of awareness,
like ownership, accountability.
And then, we just increasingly are seeing teams
find this right balance between cost and performance again.
So in certain cases improving performance,
when there resource bottlenecks in places
and other places, reducing costs by 10 plus million dollars.
Ultimately at the end of the day,
we like to see just teams being more comfortable
running their workloads in Kubernetes.
That is the ultimate sign of success
is just an organization feels comfortable
with how they're deploying,
how they're managing, how they're spending in Kubernetes.
Again, whether that be on-prem or transitioning from on-prem
to a cloud and multiple clouds, et cetera.
>> So we're talking to you today as part of the second season
of the AWS Startup Showcase.
What's the relationship there with AWS?
>> So it is the largest platform
for Kubecost being run today.
So I believe at this point,
at least a thousand different organizations
running our product on AWS hosted clusters,
whether they're EKS or self-managed,
but a growing number of those on EKS.
And we've just absolutely loved working
with the team across.
I think at this point, six or seven different groups
from marketplace to their containers team.
Obviously, EKS and others.
And just very much see them continuing to push
the boundaries on what's possible from a scale
and ease of use and just breadth of offering to this market.
>> Well, we really look forward to having you back
and hearing about some of these announcements,
things that are coming down the line.
So we'll definitely have to touch base in the future,
but just one final, more general question for you.
Where do you see Kubernetes in general going in 2022?
Is it sort of a linear growth?
Is there an inflection point that we see,?
A good percentage of software
that's running enterprises right now is already
in that open source category,
but what are your thoughts on Kubernetes in 2022?
>> Yeah, I think the one word is everywhere.
It's where I see Kubernetes in 2022,
like very deep in the like large
and really complex enterprises.
So I think you'll see just major bets there.
And I think you'll continue to see more engineers adopted
and I think you'll also continue to see
more and more flavors of it.
So some teams find that running Kubernetes
in a more serverless fashion is right for them.
Others find that having full control
at every part of the stack,
including running their own autoscaler, for example,
is really powerful.
So I think you'll see more and more options.
And again, I think teams increasingly adopting
the right abstraction level on top of Kubernetes
that works for their workloads and their organizations.
>> Sounds good.
We'll come back in 2023
and we'll check and see how that all panned out.
Well, it's been great talking to you today
as part of the Startup Showcase.
Really appreciate it.
Great to see you again.
It's right about the time where I can still tell you,
happy new year, because we're still in January here.
Hope you have a great 2022.
With that, from me, Dave Nicholson,
part of theCUBE, part of AWS Startup Showcase season two,
I'd like to thank everyone for joining
and stay with us for the best in hybrid tech coverage.
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