What is Crane used for?

Crane is a free, Apache-licensed, CNCF FinOps platform for analyzing and optimizing cloud resource costs in Kubernetes clusters, with prediction-driven autoscaling. It is a good fit for reducing Kubernetes cloud costs, and forecasting and autoscaling ahead of traffic peaks.

Is Crane open source?

Yes. Crane is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at gocrane/crane and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Crane is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Crane?

Yes. Crane can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Crane an alternative to?

Crane is an open-source alternative to CAST AI. Other open-source alternatives to CAST AI include Koordinator.

Is Crane actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Crane was on 20 December 2024, and the latest release is v0.11.0, published on 25 July 2023. The project has 2.1k stars on GitHub.

Crane: open-source alternative to CAST AI

About Crane

Crane is a FinOps platform focused on cloud resource analytics and cost management within Kubernetes clusters. It targets platform and SRE teams who need to manage cloud spending without sacrificing application reliability, and it is recognized as a FinOps Certified Solution by the FinOps Foundation.

Its approach follows an understand, analyze, optimize flow: it provides cost insight into cloud assets and Kubernetes resources such as Deployments and StatefulSets, periodically analyzes cluster state to generate optimization recommendations through a pluggable recommendation framework covering things like workload resource sizing, replica counts and idle resources, and then offers functionality to act on those recommendations and reduce cost. A standout capability is EffectiveHorizontalPodAutoscaler, which supports prediction-driven autoscaling so applications can scale up ahead of a forecasted traffic peak and scale down gracefully afterward, alongside a load-aware scheduler that places pods based on actual node usage rather than only requested resources.

Crane ships exporters that collect cloud pricing and billing data and send it to monitoring systems such as Prometheus, and it supports multi-cloud pricing through pluggable cloud provider integrations. It is written in Go, runs on Kubernetes, and is released under the Apache-2.0 license, with a live dashboard demo available for evaluation.

Key features

Cloud cost insight for Kubernetes resources
Pluggable cost-optimization recommendation framework
Prediction-driven horizontal autoscaling
Load-aware pod scheduling
Multi-cloud pricing and billing exporters
FinOps Foundation certified solution

Good fit for

→Reducing Kubernetes cloud costs
→Forecasting and autoscaling ahead of traffic peaks

Built with: Go; Kubernetes
Tags: finops; kubernetes; cost-optimization; cloud-native; autoscaling; golang; cncf

Crane: questions and answers

What is Crane used for?: Crane is a free, Apache-licensed, CNCF FinOps platform for analyzing and optimizing cloud resource costs in Kubernetes clusters, with prediction-driven autoscaling. It is a good fit for reducing Kubernetes cloud costs, and forecasting and autoscaling ahead of traffic peaks.
Is Crane open source?: Yes. Crane is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at gocrane/crane and is written mainly in Go.
Is Crane free?: Yes. Crane is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Crane?: Yes. Crane can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Crane an alternative to?: Crane is an open-source alternative to CAST AI. Other open-source alternatives to CAST AI include Koordinator.
Is Crane actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Crane was on 20 December 2024, and the latest release is v0.11.0, published on 25 July 2023. The project has 2.1k stars on GitHub.