Guest post by Matt Ray, Senior Technical Success Manager at Kubecost
As a growing number of teams scale their Kubernetes deployments, it’s becoming increasingly important for them to better understand and manage related infrastructure spend. OpenCost, now a CNCF Sandbox Project, is bringing Kubernetes and cloud cost monitoring to everyone as an open source standard and project. Many teams using Kubernetes still don’t have cost monitoring capabilities, and don’t know how much they’re spending, let alone what’s driving those costs. Cost monitoring is the first step on the journey toward understanding your Kubernetes spend and ultimately improving the efficiency of your infrastructure.
OpenCost provides a vendor-neutral specification for implementing cost monitoring in Kubernetes environments. It offers support for GCP, AWS, and Azure, and on-prem environments today with more cloud providers expected. First developed by Kubecost, a wide range of organizations, including Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Google, Mindcurv, New Relic, and Red Hat came together to describe the vendor-neutral requirements and expectations for implementing OpenCost monitoring for Kubernetes environments.
You can get started with OpenCost by checking out our GitHub repo. Adoption of our open-source cost monitoring tool is expanding rapidly. With OpenCost, you can track the cost efficiency of your Kubernetes workload allocations over time across different aggregations. OpenCost also allows you to measure the cost of the cloud assets underlying your Kubernetes deployments, breaking them down by concepts like nodes, persistent volumes, and load balancers. All of this is available via the APIs, CLI, and a web interface.
OpenCost makes it easy to bring open source Kubernetes cost monitoring into your applications and infrastructure and is being adopted and integrated into a growing number of solutions already:
Join us in the CNCF Slack channel (#opencost), subscribe to the OpenCost mailing list, or add the OpenCost community calendar and attend our working group meetings. Improvements to both API and installation documentation are in progress and we welcome feedback. The specification and code are available today at https://github.com/opencost. We’re looking forward to working with you and the broader CNCF community!