Resize and Right Size Applications on Kubernetes

It is a well understood fact on Kubernetes that there is a significant amount of wastage of expensive cloud/infrastructure because of over provisioned applications. In this blog, we will look at how app developers and platform teams can save their organizations millions of dollars by right-sizing their applications using a free, open-source tool appropriately called resize that we recently developed for our customers.

Background

In the current economic climate, every CFO and CIO is razor focused on eliminating wastage so that they can prioritize their limited budget on mission critical initiatives. As a result, pretty much every conversation we seem to have with platform teams is focused on ideas to drive down wastage and cut costs. Our customers tell us that their biggest savings would come from their pre-production environments where there is significant variability. In these environments, it appears that one of the biggest opportunities is with right sizing over-provisioned applications.

Why is this a Big Deal?

App developers tell us that they have no access to tools or data to help profile their applications to arrive at the optimal requests and limits for their pods. App developers are also asked to focus on implementing enhancements and new functionality. So, this exercise falls by the wayside and the burden falls on our friendly neighborhood platform engineer.

We have noticed that the larger the organization, the bigger the opportunity for cost savings. Some early users of the resize tool told us that they have already saved more than $0.5M in annual cloud costs due to wastage and they are just getting started with their clusters.

Demonstration

At this point, you are probably intrigued enough to think I would like to see this in action. We have created a few videos that help showcase how this works.

Platform Engineer

This persona typically has cluster wide access privileges. This person may be entrusted with the task to find wastage across all app teams and eliminate wastage. As a platform engineer, watch how you can use the resize tool to identify over-provisioned resources on a cluster across all namespaces and resize them.

App Developer

The typical app developer will typically only have access to their namespace(s) on a cluster. We hear constantly that app developers do not have the tools to profile their applications and as a result are unable to right size their applications. The centralized platform team cannot scale to supports 100s of app developers.

So, the ideal solution for an organization is to provide the resize tool to the app developers as the means for them to profile their applications and right size their manifests directly in their Git repo. As an app developer, watch how you can use the resize tool to identify over-provisioned resources in your namespace and resize them in minutes.

Try It

As we mentioned above, this is a free, open-source tool and is part of Rafay’s larger Open Source initiative to help the industry where we can. If you would like to provide feedback or have questions, please contact us. Sincere thanks to readers of our blog who spend time reading our product blogs.