How Cloud Native Can Solve the Problem of Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement

Introduction: On August 11, Alibaba Cloud Apsaras Technology Summit - Cloud native accelerated application construction special session in Shenzhen focused on enterprise IT cost management, enabling enterprises to achieve digital enterprise IT cost management and optimization in the process of cloud native biochemistry, and become the practitioners and leaders in the field of FinOps.

In the past few years, cloud native technologies represented by containers have developed rapidly. In the latest CNCF developer survey, there are more than 7 million cloud native developers worldwide in the third quarter of 2021. It is the consensus of most developers that using cloud native technology can drive enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency. However, we can also see that in the 2021 CNCF "FinOps Kubernetes Report" survey report, 68% of the respondents said that the cost of computing resources in the Kubernetes environment of their enterprises had increased in the past year. What is the reason behind this?

Through communication and analysis with enterprises, we found that enterprises are currently facing five major problems:

Planning is difficult. After the business is migrated to the container scenario, it is necessary to plan the capacity of the application. Over-allocation of resources will lead to resource waste, and overselling of resources will lead to stability problems.

Billing is difficult. Compared with traditional applications, container applications are more flexible and dynamic, and can create and release resources on demand, which also poses greater challenges to cost estimation.

It is difficult to divide accounts. Different from traditional application deployment and resource binding. Now multiple container applications share a K8s cluster. A computing node can run multiple Pods, and Pods can scale elastically and migrate dynamically between nodes. The application layer and the resource layer cannot achieve one-to-one correspondence in space, time and other dimensions, resulting in the complexity of cost management.

It is difficult to optimize. Cloud native technologies, such as elastic, hybrid, serverless and oversold, have their own typical scenarios. If used improperly, such as the wrong elastic configuration, it may cause unexpected resource waste and even stability problems.

Management is difficult. Hybrid cloud has become the new normal of enterprise IT architecture. Kubernetes can help enterprises shield basic differences. However, the financial management capabilities vary in different environments, and the lack of unified and open consumption data model for management makes it difficult for enterprises to conduct overall cost analysis and optimization from a global perspective.

In recent years, with the acceleration of enterprises' cloud access, the concept of cloud financial management (FinOps) has been mentioned and adopted by more and more enterprises. FinOps is a cloud operation mode, which combines systems, best practices and culture to improve the ability of organizations to solve cloud costs. This is an approach that brings financial responsibility for cloud spending, enabling the team to make wise business decisions. FinOps enhances collaboration among IT, engineering, finance, procurement and enterprises. It enables IT to develop into a service organization focused on using cloud technology to add value to the business. When cloud native technology and the concept of FinOps are intertwined, the concept of cloud native IT cost governance (Cloud Native FinOps) is conceived. It is an evolution and evolution of the concept of FinOps in the cloud native scenario.

In order to solve the new challenges brought by cloud architecture and cloud native technology, enterprises began to focus on new cost governance methods. Through the collaboration of IT, finance, business and other teams, we can help enterprises achieve better financial control and predictability while ensuring business development. On August 11, in Shenzhen, Alibaba Cloud Apsaras Technology Summit - Cloud native accelerated application construction special session focused on enterprise IT cost governance, enabling enterprises to achieve digital enterprise IT cost management and optimization in the process of cloud native biochemistry, and become the practitioners and leaders in the field of FinOps.