It’s inevitable that containerized infrastructure runs a certain amount of overhead capacity that is not used by underlying workloads. This “idle” usage has an associated cost (for the backing VMs and volumes) that needs to be accounted for. We have introduced the ability to distribute these idle container costs within Cloudability core analytics (reports and dashboards). While this is a capability that already exists in the dedicated Container Cost Allocation feature, adding it to core analytics can help users streamline chargeback processes and enables more flexible cost reporting. This distribution is done in the context of the Kubernetes constructs namespace and label.

This support is implemented through the introduction of a new metric category “Containers”, which makes available six new metrics. These metrics enable users to view separately the utilized, idle and fairshare costs either with a cash or amortized basis. For customers with custom pricing enabled these will all be represented as “adjusted” metrics.

Understanding the utilized, idle and fairshare cost metrics

The Container Cost Allocation feature evaluates resource utilization on each node and marries this to the billing data to calculate the cost of each cluster and to associate a direct, “utilized cost”, to K8s namespace and label values (this has been available within core reporting by using the namespace or a label dimension). With this enhancement you can also report on the idle cost via the new metric, which is allocated to the namespace and label values proportionally based on their direct cost contribution of each node. The Fairshare Cost is simply the Utilized Cost and Idle Cost combined - you could think of it as the total cost. Here are some considerations and reporting ideas to keep in mind with these new metrics:

•       For non-container costs these new metrics will all return as $0. To filter to container only data try a filter such as “Cluster Name not equals (not set)”
•       Use these metrics with different dimensions to easily visualize utilized vs idle. For example, list out by Cluster Name or resource ID.
•       For the first time you can use cash and amortized cost basis together for detailed container cost reporting.

 
Example Use Cases

To fully allocate the costs at the Namespace level use the Fairshare Cost metric. Try yourself with this report. For a different view customers might also find it handy to just report by Cluster Name or Resource ID - this can help identify where high idle rates are a problem.


To visualize trends in utilized versus idle costs you can create multiple layers in a dashboard widget. You could do this for all clusters as shown below, or for specific clusters.


Important: With this release, the new metrics are populated back to 1st May 2023. To populate additional historical data, reach out to your account team or support for the reprocess to be completed