By Clement Leroux, Analytics Engineer – FinOps, GitLab
Each feature team is responsible for their own Kubernetes deployment for their apps.
There’s significant potential to optimize resource usage as a considerable gap has been observed between the requested resources and actual usage.
Our mission is to inspire engineers to scrutinize their resource usage versus requests, fine-tune their Terraform deployments, and remove unnecessary ones.
We designed a fun and simple contest, providing all teams with a couple of weeks to take action. An hourly-updated dashboard showcased a team-by-team ranking based on the percentage of cost savings achieved. The friendly competition stirred momentum as every team wanted the top spot, while engineers were also jumping from team to team to help the less Kubernetes savvy teams.
In the end, all participants were offered prizes. The Kubernetes expenses were promptly reduced by approximately 10%, with even greater savings materializing over time.