Today, IBM is announcing the acquisition of Kubecost, a leading Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization software company.

Usage of Kubernetes is rapidly growing, with 84% of organizations using or evaluating the technology today1. As datasets grow more complex, modern workloads deployed via containers are being leveraged more widely – making cost visibility, management and resource optimization for these shared resources a pressing concern for cloud practitioners.

FinOps, an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, provides organizations with a viable and strategic approach to managing this workload complexity. With this acquisition, 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 our commitment to FinOps teams, DevOps teams, and the open-source community as a whole.

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 optimization 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 Optimization, 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 optimize cloud spend and prevent resource-based outages. This deeper view into Kubernetes workload optimization becomes easier with Kubecost.

Today’s announcement 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 which help organizations reduce complexity and increase control of organizations’ IT environments.

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