May 2023 Summaries

Vantage has introduced Kubernetes Cost Efficiency Metrics, enabling customers to assess the efficiency of their Kubernetes clusters, namespaces, and labels on a daily basis. This feature complements existing capabilities such as enterprise reporting, visibility, and cost allocation, allowing businesses to better manage their Kubernetes-related expenses. Previously, customers had to rely on multiple FinOps tools or manual processes to understand cluster efficiency, which was cumbersome and costly. By integrating with OpenCost, users can now easily view efficiency metrics, including idle and total costs, and identify over-provisioned applications. This update is available at no extra cost for certain Vantage users, with instructions provided for setting up OpenCost integration. The new metrics are displayed in the Kubernetes portion of the Vantage console, offering insights into resource utilization compared to resource requests, and future updates will include recommendations for rightsizing Pods.

In a comparison of clickhouse-local and DuckDB for analyzing over two billion rows of cloud infrastructure spending data, clickhouse-local demonstrated a significant speed advantage, being three times faster than DuckDB for both reading and writing operations. Despite its performance edge, clickhouse-local's user experience was noted to be less favorable, particularly in terms of saving tables locally and preserving query states across sessions. The analysis was conducted on a 16 GB MacBook Pro using gzipped CSV files, with data eventually loaded into each tool for querying. While DuckDB offers a more user-friendly experience, clickhouse-local's raw speed makes it appealing for handling large datasets, though the need to load data from disk every session can be impractical. The piece highlights the rapid innovation in database technologies like clickhouse-local and DuckDB, which provide valuable tools for data engineering tasks such as generating complex reports and visualizations.

Vantage has attained SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, demonstrating its adherence to rigorous security and privacy standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Achieving this certification involved a comprehensive nine-month process during which Vantage ensured its technical systems and organizational policies met best-in-class security criteria. The certification process concluded with a three-month audit conducted by Prescient Assurance, supported by Vanta, affirming Vantage's commitment to security excellence. This milestone assures over 5,000 global organizations that trust Vantage as their preferred FinOps platform, although it has no impact on free-tier users. Interested parties can request a copy of the SOC 2 Type 2 certification report from Vantage.

In a development diary, the Vantage Team describes their experience integrating OpenAI's API to help customers understand their infrastructure bills. They discovered an undocumented API endpoint, /usage, through ChatGPT, which enabled access to usage data, despite initial uncertainty about its validity. The team used Ruby and cURL scripts to simulate OpenAI usage, learning to interpret fields like aggregation_timestamp, n_requests, and n_generated_tokens_total to calculate costs. Although OpenAI's current_usage_usd field remains non-functional, the team managed to approximate costs closely by using regex patterns and summing tokens used. The diary highlights the potential for cost savings and encourages users to explore tracking cloud costs via Vantage's platform.