Red Hat’s CoreOS Unit Releases App Metering Tool
When Red Hat acquired application container specialist CoreOS in January, it was looking to leverage the startup’s energetic development team churning out open-source tools for agile cloud computing.
Those efforts appear to be bearing fruit with the release of several “operator” tools designed for container-based application development and for monitoring cloud consumption.
The Red Hat unit recently released to the open source community an “Operator Framework” for building applications with Kubernetes. This week, it launched an “Operator Metering” tool for tracking cloud usage and costs. The entire tool kit is intended to help operators manage and scale Kubernetes operations without breaking the bank.
The metering feature aims to give IT administrators a usage reporting tool for services used to run applications on Kubernetes, which is making steady headway in datacenters as application containers begin to scale. The tracking capability “will enable Kubernetes operations teams to be able to associate the cost of their underlying infrastructure to the applications running on their Kubernetes clusters in a consistent way, across any environment, be it on public cloud infrastructure or on premises,” the CoreOS team at Red Hat noted in a blogposted on Thursday (June 7).
Part of an expanding container ecosystem, the tool is specifically designed to help operations teams correlate the cost of underlying IT infrastructure to applications running on their Kubernetes clusters. IT departments have in the past tended to overestimate cloud and other infrastructure resource requirements. The metering tool aims to help operators avoid wasting capacity.
Specific metering examples include cloud budgeting that allows teams to gauge the amount of cloud resources being consumed, “especially in auto-scaled clusters or hybrid cloud deployments,” Red Hat said.
Meanwhile, service usage can be tracked across operational teams running, for example, hundreds of databases, the company added.
The Operator Framework and Metering code are available here on GitHub.
Red Hat acquired San Francisco-based CoreOS in late January for $250 million as it seeks to move deeper into the expanding micro-services delivery sector.
