IBM has further expanded its FinOps portfolio with the acquisition of Kubecost, a leading startup specializing in Kubernetes cost management. This move follows the company’s significant investments in the FinOps space, including the $4.3 billion acquisition of Apptio in 2023.
Founded in 2019, San Francisco-based Kubecost is the creator of a cloud-based service that helps organizations to monitor and optimize Kubernetes clusters that host the components of modern applications. It’s designed to ensure those clusters are making the most efficient use of their computing resources to enable better cost management.
Kubecost’s flagship product is called Kubecost Cloud, which is based on the open-source OpenCost project. It provides developers and engineering teams with actionable and accurate cost-related data for Kubernetes installations, plus various other tools that can help to reduce the expense of running that software. It can be deployed inside any Kubernetes cluster, where it tries to find ways to reduce running costs without any impact on application performance.
“Since launching in 2019, our mission has been to optimize the world’s infrastructure,” Kubecost co-founder and CEO Webb Brown wrote in the company blog. “We started with Kubernetes cost monitoring, and we’ve proudly become the most widely adopted solution in the cloud native ecosystem. Now, as a result of this merger, we’re poised to accelerate our mission by delivering broader, end-to-end cost management solutions to teams everywhere.”
