IBM Broadens Hybrid Cloud Cost Management Capabilities with Kubecost Acquisition

IBM has announced it is acquiring Kubecost, a leading Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimisation software company.

Usage of Kubernetes is rapidly growing, with 84% of organisations using or evaluating the technology today. As datasets grow more complex, modern workloads deployed via containers are being leveraged more widely—making cost visibility, management, and resource optimisation for these shared resources a pressing concern for cloud practitioners.

FinOps, an operational framework and cultural practice that maximises the business value of cloud, provides organisations with a viable and strategic approach to managing this workload complexity. With its acquisition of Kubecost, IBM is showcasing its commitment to the growth of FinOps, both by setting the pace for innovation, as well as strategically bringing leading technologies together. The addition of Kubecost to IBM’s FinOps solutions deepens the latter’s commitment to FinOps teams, DevOps teams, and the open-source community as a whole.

Kubecost Gives IBM Best-in-Class Cost Management

Following IBM’s recent acquisition of Apptio in 2023, the addition of Kubecost adds best-in-class container cost management to the IBM FinOps Suite. IBM’s FinOps suite combines IBM Cloudability’s FinOps capabilities and IBM Turbonomic’s AI-automated cloud performance optimisation integrations in one solution to give teams the ability to inform, optimize, and operate cloud investments regardless of where their workloads are hosted.

In fact, IBM Cloudability was recently named a leader in the report “The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Cost Management and Optimisation, Q3 2024.” The need to combine Kubernetes and cloud cost monitoring, financial business insights and cloud optimization into a comprehensive solution can benefit practitioners wherever they are in their journey.

Kubecost delivers real-time cost visibility and insights needed to not only understand infrastructure spend, but intelligently reduce spend and avoid over-provisioning within Kubernetes environments. With direct integrations into the Kubernetes and cloud billing APIs, FinOps teams can get a comprehensive view of their workloads to optimise cloud spend and prevent resource-based outages. This deeper view into Kubernetes workload optimisation becomes easier with Kubecost.

This acquisition is another example of IBM strengthening its automation portfolio through a mix of organic innovation like IBM Concert and strategic acquisitions like Apptio, Turbonomic, Instana, NS1 and Pliant—all of which help organisations reduce complexity and increase control of their  IT environments.

Founded in 2019, Kubecost is based in San Francisco, CA and is led by it  Co-Founder and CEO, Webb Brown, and Co-Founder and CTO, Ajay Tripathy.

Clients can learn more about Kubecost’s solutions by visiting https://www.kubecost.com/.