Tightening Our Cloud Native Belts: OpenCost for Kubernetes Cost Monitoring

Matt Ray, the community manager for the CNCF sandbox project OpenCost, discusses their cloud and Kubernetes cost monitoring technology. He covers the capabilities of OpenCost in tracking cloud expenses and its new feature for monitoring carbon costs. Matt elaborates on the project's origin, its open source community, and the collaborative effort with other companies like Grafana and Microsoft. The conversation covers the community's growth, contribution processes, and OpenCost's goals for becoming more diverse and integrated with other technologies. Matt also reflects on the increasing interest in cost monitoring and his personal journey in the open source community.

 

00:00 Introduction to Matt Ray and OpenCost

01:09 OpenCost's Origins and CNCF Contribution

02:25 OpenCost vs. KubeCost: Defining the Boundaries

03:35 Adoption and Integration of OpenCost

04:30 Community Contributions and Project Growth

07:00 Flexibility and Use Cases of OpenCost

13:58 Becoming a Committer and Maintainer

14:47 Community Engagement and Participation

15:25 Future Plans and Focus

16:39 Carbon Cost and Plugin Architecture

17:53 Personal Journey in Open Source

 

Guest:

Matt Ray has been active in Open Source and DevOps communities for over two decades and has spoken at and helped organize many conferences and meetups. He is currently the Senior Community Manager at Kubecost for the CNCF Sandbox Project OpenCost. He has worked in and with enterprises and startups across a wide variety of industries including banking, retail, and government. He currently resides in Sydney, Australia after relocating from Austin, Texas. He co-hosts the Software Defined Talk podcast and is active on Mastodon, GitHub, and too many Slacks.