Kubernetes is amazing. It helps teams deploy, scale, and run applications with ease. But there’s a catch—it can get expensive. Fast. That’s where FinOps comes in.
What’s FinOps?
It’s short for “Financial Operations.” In simple terms, it means applying financial accountability to technology spending. It’s a way to make smarter financial decisions in the cloud era.
Why Kubernetes Costs Can Get Out of Control
Think of Kubernetes like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
You order resources (CPU, memory, nodes), but if you take more than you need, you still pay for all of it. And let’s be honest—teams often overestimate what they need “just to be safe.”
The result? Waste. Hidden waste.
The FinOps Mindset in a Kubernetes World
A FinOps approach to Kubernetes means asking the right questions:
- Who’s using what resources?
- Do we actually need all that compute and memory?
- Are we running workloads at the most cost-effective times and places?
With Kubernetes, there’s no invoiced breakdown per team in your cloud bill. That’s why you need tools and practices to track usage and assign costs properly.
Start Here: Basic FinOps Practices for Kubernetes
If you’re just starting your FinOps journey, here are the simple steps to get things under control.
1. Tag All the Things (Labels!)
Kubernetes supports labels—use them!
Assign labels to namespaces, pods, services, and workloads. Labels like: team, environment, app, owner.
This will help identify who runs what and tie costs to teams or departments.
Example labels:
team: frontendenv: productionowner: alice
2. Use Namespaces Wisely
Namespaces are great for organizing resources. Use a namespace per team or per app. This makes it easier to track consumption and apply limits.
You can also apply resource quotas at the namespace level to stop teams from over-consuming.
3. Monitor Resource Requests and Limits
Here’s where many forget.
Kubernetes lets you define how much CPU and memory a container needs (requests) and what its max allowance is (limits).
Treat these settings like budgets.
- If requests are too high, you’re wasting cash.
- If limits are too low, your app might crash when under load.
Use tools like Prometheus and Grafana to track usage vs. requests.
And be sure to regularly right-size those values!
4. Turn Off Idle Stuff
Is your dev environment running 24/7? Why?
Set policies to shut down non-prod workloads during nights and weekends.
This small move can save thousands each month.
5. Use Cluster Autoscaling (But Carefully)
Kubernetes can grow and shrink based on need. The cluster autoscaler increases node count when more resources are required. But you can also autoscale deployments and pods.
Autoscaling helps with cost-efficiency—but only if your workloads are properly configured. Otherwise, it can lead to unexpected growth… and unexpected costs.
Pro tip: combine autoscaling with robust monitoring. Trust, but verify!
6. Watch Out for DaemonSets
DaemonSets run a pod on every node. Great for logging or monitoring agents.
But they scale with the node count. If you add nodes, you get more pods—even if you don’t need them.
This can cost more than you think. Keep an eye on them.
Tools That Can Help
You don’t have to go full spreadsheet mode. There are awesome tools to help you manage Kubernetes costs:
- Kubecost – Real-time cost monitoring for Kubernetes.
- CloudHealth – Cloud cost management, including Kubernetes insight.
- Lens, K9s – Great for visualizing and navigating your clusters.
- Prometheus + Grafana – Monitor, alert, and visualize your resources.
Most cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) also offer kubernetes-aware tools inside their cost consoles. Use them!
Showback and Chargeback: Accountability Time
Once you’ve tagged and labeled everything, you can start to report usage per team. This is called showback.
You don’t have to bill teams yet—but showing them their usage is eye-opening.
Later, if you want to take it further, you can implement chargeback models. This means actually allocating infrastructure costs back to each team, based on their usage.
Here’s the magic: it drives behavior change.
- Teams will ask if they really need that XXL pod.
- They might schedule jobs in low-cost hours.
- They’ll improve their apps to be more efficient.
Embrace Spot and Preemptible Instances
Running on AWS or GCP? Use spot instances (AWS) or preemptible VMs (GCP) for batch jobs or fault-tolerant applications.
They can be up to 80% cheaper!
Use taints and tolerations in Kubernetes to separate these cheaper nodes. Then schedule non-critical workloads on them.
It’s like flying economy when business class isn’t needed.
Make It a Team Sport
FinOps isn’t just for finance folks or SREs. Make it everyone’s business.
Hold showback meetings. Share dashboards. Praise the team that dropped their monthly costs 30%.
Make efficiency cool.
Final Thoughts
Kubernetes can be your best friend or your priciest partner in crime. By applying FinOps principles from the start, you gain visibility, control, and agility.
And guess what? You don’t have to do it all at once.
Start small. Label resources. Right-size requests. Track spending.
Then level up. Add automation. Build cost reports. Involve more teams.
The goal isn’t just to save money—it’s to build smarter, leaner, and more responsible tech organizations.
Kubernetes is powerful. FinOps makes it sustainable.
Now go put those clusters on a budget!