More than 5.5M developers are using Kubernetes, reports Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). As it is expected to grow in the upcoming years, Kubecost has developed an open-source solution that will monitor and optimise Kubernetes’ spending at scale.
Secured $25M
To step up the game, California-based Kubecost announced that it has secured $25M in Series A funding led by Coatue Management. Additional investors, including First Round Capital and Afore Capital, also participated.
Besides funding, lead investor David Cahn, Partner at Coatue, will join the Kubecost board of directors. Kubecost angel investors include Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli and Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield.
Founded by former Google employees
Kubecost was founded by two former Google employees, Webb Brown and Ajay Tripathy, who spent four years each, working on infrastructure monitoring solutions for Google infrastructure and Google Cloud.
“At Google, we were focused on the relationship between cost, performance, and health for internal Google services and external developers,” says Webb Brown, co-founder, and CEO of Kubecost.
He adds, “We saw first-hand how intertwined the infrastructure, orchestration, and container layers were. Kubecost launched in early 2019, and we now have thousands of companies using our product. Developer and engineering teams appreciate our commitment to improving the developer experience, and to giving other enterprise stakeholders visibility and actionable controls over complex Kubernetes spend.”
Kubecost is an open-source project launched by Stackwatch in April 2019.
Brown says, “We’ve already built a vibrant, active open source community around Kubecost and we are actively involved in the broader Kubernetes community, with more exciting contributions to come.”
“As engineers ourselves, we wanted to build a product experience where you could install, use and, if desired, purchase software the way we wanted,” said Brown. “We didn’t want developers to have to contact sales to get their hands on it. We didn’t want developers to share sensitive cloud spend data. We wanted them to have total control over their information. And we wanted developers to be able to install and even modify our software in minutes. We want everybody to have access to our software, no matter their budget.”
Optimises Kubernetes spending
The US company provides organisations with a cost monitoring platform to help companies manage their Kubernetes resources and costs. Here, users own and control their data, and view spending across multiple clusters from a single pane of glass.
Through the platform, users can fully understand exactly where expenses originate through granular cost allocation breakdowns by attributes, including deployment, service, and namespace label.
Further, Kubecost also supports organisations with alerts and governance, including real-time notifications that catch cost overruns and infrastructure outage risks before they become costly issues.
Rapid adoption
The company’s solution has achieved rapid enterprise adoption, with the solution now managing more than $2B in Kubernetes spending and providing cost transparency and optimization to thousands of organizations.
In fact, the CNCF survey identified Kubecost as the most used tool for tracking Kubernetes spend across all major clouds or in on-prem environments. It currently has more than 2,000 companies using the software across all major cloud providers and on-prem in air-gapped environments.
“We are excited to partner with Kubecost,” says David Cahn, a partner at Coatue. “We believe cloud costs are a growing priority for tech companies—and we think Kubecost has a unique combination of scaled developer adoption and usage at large enterprises. We’re looking forward to working with Webb and the team to make Kubecost the de-facto platform for developers.”
