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What is Red Hat Lightspeed cost management?

Cost Management Service 1-latest

Learn how to track your OpenShift and cloud costs

Red Hat Customer Content Services

Abstract

Cost management is part of the Red Hat Lightspeed portfolio of services.

Preface
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Red Hat Lightspeed cost management simplifies managing resources and costs across OpenShift Container Platform and public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, helping system administrators optimize spending and align IT costs with business priorities.

With the expanding scale and performance of containerized business applications, you need aggregated and meaningful data so that you can quickly analyze your cluster spending and align with business priorities. To overcome business challenges, cost management gives your organization visibility into your costs down to the project level for OpenShift clusters. This visibility provides IT and financial stakeholders with a unique snapshot into the costs associated with applications.

Cost management is included with your subscription to the Red Hat Lightspeed portfolio of services.

You can use cost management to perform the following tasks to help your organization optimize costs, increase efficiency, and save money:

  • Visualize, understand, and analyze how you use your resources across hybrid cloud infrastructure.
  • Track cost trends.
  • Breakdown charges to your projects and organizations.
  • Use cost models to apply cost to OpenShift usage metrics or add markups, or both.
  • Forecast your future consumption.
  • Optimize your resources and usage.
  • Identify patterns of usage that you might want to investigate.
  • Export data to integrate with third-party tools.

Red Hat Lightspeed cost management calculates the cost of your infrastructure by matching price to usage. To use cost management, you provide data from one or both of these categories depending on your business goals.

Cost management is a processing engine that uses the following flow:

  • Identify costs: What do you pay?

    • Cloud billing integration: Connect your AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud bill. Cost management pulls your actual spending, including specific discounts, savings plans, and reserved instance rates.

      Note

      NOTE: If you are a Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) or an Azure Red Hat Openshift customer (ARO), the cost of your ROSA or ARO subscription is included in the cloud bill and cost management automatically distributes it to your workloads. However, due to limitations in the data that AWS accepts from the Red Hat Subscriptions service, for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS Hosted Control Plane (ROSA HCP) subscriptions, you must create a cost model that includes some rates.Red Hat is working to resolve this issue.

    • Custom cost models: Create a price list within cost management to define what resources should cost. This is the only source of costs for on-premise environments. You can also use cost models to add overhead costs such as labor, licensing, or security to your cloud spend or distribute specific costs such as worker unallocated costs to your OpenShift projects.
  • Identify OpenShift resource usage: What clusters do you have metrics for? The cost management operator collects usage information from the cluster.

Cost management does not use public prices. Instead, it reads your cloud bill to process the savings plans, reserved instances, discounts, or other costs that you have. Cost management also tracks which nodes run on which pods. If you have different instance types, or the same instance types but with different prices, cost management can still attribute the correct cost to each pod.

Additional resources

Chapter 2. Cost management example configurations
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Because many businesses are hybrid, cost management can process multiple deployment scenarios simultaneously: cloud-only, OpenShift on cloud, on-premises OpenShift, and hybrid environments.

  • The cloud-only user: You connect a cloud bill. You see your total cloud spend and you can filter by tags or accounts. Cost management provides visibility at the service level, for example, how much you spent on Amazon S3 or Azure Disk Storage.
  • The OpenShift on cloud user: You connect your cloud bill and OpenShift cluster to correlate your OpenShift usage to infrastructure resources and costs. Cost management breaks down infrastructure costs further. The usage metrics you provide gives insight into which OpenShift projects and nodes are responsible for the source of your costs.
  • The on-premise OpenShift user: You connect an OpenShift cluster and create a custom cost model. You see how your internal projects are consuming your physical server capacity and apply costs to them.
  • The hybrid user: You connect cloud bills, on-premise clusters, and cost models. Cost management provides a single, unified view of your entire spend.

cost management distributes cloud costs in the following way:

  1. From your cloud bill, cost management takes the cost of all of your nodes and determines what nodes belong to what cluster and which nodes are worker or primary nodes.
  2. Cost management then determines what pods are running on what cluster and namespace and calculates how much central processing units (CPU), memory, disk space, and PVCs each one uses.
  3. Cost management attributes cloud bill costs to OpenShift clusters based on relative resource usage, which ensures costs are accurately distributed to each pod.
  4. Use a cost model in cost management to apply a price list to OpenShift usage data. In addition, in a hybrid cloud environment a cost model can distribute cloud costs to OpenShift resources. Cost models are not required for public cloud data but can be used to add markups.

To run cost management, Red Hat gathers your cost and usage data, but does not collect identifying information such as user names, passwords, or certificates.

For more information about your privacy and data, log in to the Customer Portal and see Red Hat’s Privacy Policy and our FAQ page.

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