Chapter 1. Why use 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:

These preceding goals can ultimately help your organization optimize costs, increase efficiency, and save money.

It is important to understand the following key OpenShift concepts to work with cost management:

Cost management distributes the sum of the costs from your cloud provider (if any) and the costs in any price lists. Price lists can be defined in Red Hat OpenShift cost models and there are more than 40 dimensions that you can use to define a unit cost. Your environment will have one of the following configurations:

The following steps outline how cost management distributes the costs for a cloud environment, either with or without custom-defined price lists:

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 pods run on which nodes at each moment in time. 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.