Chapter 3. Key concepts in cost management
Review the following terms to ensure you understand important definitions in cost management.
- Cost
- The sum of infrastructure and supplementary costs or the total cost for the filtered data. This sum can include the cost for a particular account, region, or service.
- Raw cost
- The costs that a cloud provider reports before any cost model calculations.
- Unallocated costs
- The costs that you can view when you group OpenShift cost data by project. These costs are in the rows Platform unallocated and Worker unallocated and are available when viewing OpenShift cost data by project.
- Platform unallocated costs
- The costs for parts of primary and infrastructure nodes that are not allocated to run workloads. In this case, those workloads are the OpenShift platform or control plane.
- Worker unallocated costs
- The costs that represent any unused part of your worker node’s usage and request capacity.
- Unattributed cost
- The costs associated with a cloud integration that is not attributed to an OpenShift project.
- Overhead costs
- The costs that you outlay to administer your cloud account.
3.1. Cost layers
You can create costs at different layers of the environment. In cost management, all costs can be classified as either infrastructure or supplementary costs. To customize what cost management shows on the Details page, you can allocate and present your costs as any of the cost layers in your cost model.
- Infrastructure cost
In cost management, all cloud costs are considered infrastructure costs. They can include costs that cloud providers directly report through an Amazon (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud export. However, you can also designate infrastructure costs calculated from a price list for rates specifically marked as infrastructure.
NoteOpenShift Container Platform node and cluster cost per month rates are classified as infrastructure cost by default. You can choose to classify them as supplementary.
- Supplementary cost
- All costs not directly attributed to infrastructure are identified as supplementary costs. In cost management, these costs come from applying a price list to the metrics taken from an OpenShift cluster. The rates in the price list must be specified as supplementary. This is the default for all OpenShift costs except node and cluster cost per month.
3.2. Additional resources
For more information about cost models, see Cost model terminology.
For information about distributing costs, see Understanding cost distribution in cost management
