Chapter 1. Why use cost management
Cost management is a free offering as part of your subscription to the Red Hat Insights portfolio of services. With cost management, you can monitor and analyze your costs to improve the management of your business.
Cost management helps you simplify the management of your resources and costs across container platforms like OpenShift Container Platform, as well as public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
1.1. What can you accomplish with cost management?
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 on-premise and public cloud environments. This visibility gives IT and financial stakeholders a unique snapshot into the costs associated with applications.
With cost management, you can achieve some of the following goals:
- Visualize, understand, and analyze how you use your resources and costs across hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Track cost trends
- Map charges to projects and organizations
- Use cost models to normalize data and add markups
- Forecast your future consumption and compare it with your budgets
- Optimize your resources and usage
- Identify patterns of usage that you might want to investigate
- Integrate with third party tools that can use your cost and resourcing data
These preceding goals can ultimately help your organization optimize costs, increase efficiency, and save money.
1.2. How does cost management work?
It’s important to understand some key OpenShift concepts:
- Cluster
- a group of servers that are managed together and participate in workload management.
- Node
a worker machine that is either virtual or physical, depending on the cluster.
- Master node: The master node hosts the control plane and manages the cluster, including scheduling and scaling applications and maintaining the state of the cluster.
- Worker node: Worker nodes are responsible for running the containers and executing the workloads.
- Pod
- a collection of one or more containers. It is the smallest unit possible.
- Persistent volume claim (PVC)
- Persistent volume (PV) framework enables cluster administrators to provision persistent storage for a cluster. Developers can use persistent volume claims (PVCs) to request PV resources.
At a high level, cost management calculates your costs by processing data from your integrations in the following ways:
- 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 master nodes.
- 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.
- Cost management multiplies the cost from the cloud bill by the established usage metrics to calculate the amount of money that each pod is costing you.
If you have a cost model, it distributes the cost of the platform or the cost of unallocated capacity.
- If you do not create a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cost model, we use the implicit cost model. This method distributes the cost from the cloud bill based on CPU effective use.
Cost management does not use public prices. Rather, 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 same instance types but with different prices, cost management can still attribute the correct cost to each pod.
