Highlights
- DevFinOps is a pivotal strategy for cost-effective cloud infrastructure use. With its principles of analysis, benchmarking, optimization, and negotiation, it helps enterprises control and reduce cloud spending while promoting efficiency and innovation within the organization.
- Kube-green effectively reduces the carbon footprint of Kubernetes clusters by smartly turning off non-essential parts of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters during non-business hours, promoting energy efficiency and environmental responsibility.
- Velero, a tool designed for Kubernetes workloads, simplifies the process of disaster recovery and data migration, enabling organizations to recover from downtime quickly and ensuring smooth business operations with its detailed backups and swift system restorations.
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Cloud story
More and more businesses are moving from traditional in-house IT infrastructures to cloud computing environments.
Apart from the scalability and resilience offered by the cloud providers, the shift also allows companies to use advanced technologies such as DevOps and AI-ML.
Take, for instance, the case of one of the largest retailers in the Middle East region. When they planned their digital transformation in partnership with TCS, they chose Kubernetes as a tool for container applications. Kubernetes is an open-source platform that is portable, resilient, and highly scalable. It is widely used in the IT industry and has become a go-to tool for microservices.
DevFinOps is a pivotal strategy for cost-efficient cloud usage, integrating principles of analysis, benchmarking, optimization, and negotiation to slash cloud expenses while fostering efficiency and innovation.
Resource and cost optimization
However, after making the shift, many organizations are concerned about the cost-benefit of moving to the cloud.
While it's easier to provision infrastructure with just a few clicks, controlling costs is still a significant challenge. Enter DevFinOps, which is short for development, finance, and operations. It focuses on cost-effective cloud infrastructure use through resource and cost optimization, which has led to the development of various tools available in the market, such as Kubecost.
The basic principles of DevFinOps include analysis, benchmarking, optimization, and negotiation. An organization must repeat these steps periodically to ensure efficiency, promote innovation, and reduce costs.
Going back to the example of the retail major, Kubecost was chosen to analyze and optimize the cost of Kubernetes workloads. Kub cost works with all major cloud providers, and when implemented and monitored for 15 days, it showed almost 48% savings in total cloud spending on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Reducing carbon footprints
Kube-green is another tool that focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of Kubernetes clusters.
It might sound odd at first—what do clusters have to do with carbon footprint?
Let's break this down. Think about all the emails we send and receive every day. The servers storing these emails are located in massive data centers that run 24/7 and use lots of energy and need things like water or air conditioning to cool down. Calculations show that if everyone in the UK sent one less unnecessary email each day, it would cut carbon dioxide emissions equal to 81,152 flights from London to Madrid.
Now, let's look at how Kube-green works. It works by smartly turning off non-essential parts of AKS clusters during non-business hours. Usually, these virtual machines are just sitting idle, especially after office hours and on weekends. Most of the time, virtual machines run without doing much, impacting the environment, and costing more. Kube-green tackles this by reducing energy use and aligning with our goal of being environmentally responsible.
Ensure disaster recovery with sustainability
Businesses must ensure their operations can continue even in the face of disasters.
While cloud services are known for being highly available, resilient, and redundant, it's critical to recognize the importance of disaster recovery mechanisms. Nonetheless, many organizations are reluctant to invest in disaster recovery services due to perceptions of high costs and lack of necessity.
Cloud providers offer robust features, but some crises can take time to resolve. Challenges also arise from managed services with limited visibility, including issues like isolated system backups, elevated cluster privileges, longer recovery times, and the manual effort required for application deployments.
Consider an AKS cluster facing downtime. Organizations might need help finding a quick resolution, questioning how long it might take. The process of setting up a new cluster and moving applications over is not only tricky but also error-prone, potentially leading to further service interruptions. However, there's a solution that could turn this situation around in minutes.
Enter Velero, a tool designed with Kubernetes workloads in mind. It allows for detailed backups and swift system restorations. By adopting Velero, disaster recovery, and data migration become more straightforward, offering clear advantages.
By proactively evaluating and adopting tools like Velero, organizations can ensure smooth business operations and effectively tackle unpredictable challenges.
