What is KubeCost ?

Kubecost, a product which you can be used to manage your kubernetes cluster cost. It divides your cost according to namespace, deployments, service. You can also divide costs based on different teams or environment. The fun part it is open source software. As a result it is built on top of Prometheus and Grafana

Significant Features

Cost Management at one place

You can monitor cost of all the cluster together here, be it on AWS, GCP, Azure or on-premise.

Optimization Insights

It provides you possible optimisation for your cluster resources and help reduce cost by 30-50 % that too without sharing a single bit of information about your infra.

For example: It not only predicts monthly bills but analyses and tells about unused resources, so you can then optimise your nodes accordingly.

Alerts for Expense and Resources Overuse

Get real-time updates about budget overrun, unknown expenses, or under-used resources directly to your email or slack.

Privacy of your expenditure data

You install it on the cluster and keep your data . No sending any bit of data to any of kubecost API or remote service.

Hands On Demo using a cloud provided cluster -

Once you have your Kubernetes cluster up and running
```
minikube start
```

Once you complete this we open Lens IDE and connect to the minikube cluster ( kubeconfig file located at ~/.kube/config )

You can follow the installation steps to add kubecost to your cluster.

How to install ?

You need to install it only on the Control Plane node.

Create a new namespace for kubecost using kubectl
```
kubectl create namespace kubecost
```

Method 1: Using Helm

Add from helm repo

helm repo add kubecost https://kubecost.github.io/cost-analyzer/

Finally install to you cluster

helm install kubecost kubecost/cost-analyzer --namespace kubecost --set kubecostToken="bmlnZWZpNzg0MEBnYW1lNGhyLmNvbQ==xm343yadf98"

Method 2: You can use a manifest file also to install this

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubecost/cost-analyzer-helm-chart/master/kubecost.yaml --namespace kubecost

The above installation will create kubecost new deployments, services and pods in namespace kubecost

Wait until cost-analyser pod is in running state
After installation complete, you need to port-forward to port 9090 to access the kubecost app installed on your kubernetes cluster on your localhost.

kubectl port-forward --namespace kubecost deployment/kubecost-cost-analyzer 9090

Open localhost:9090 It should show you the kubecost dashboard

visit kubecost installation doc for more info

Navigating the Dashboard

Once installed the program will take some time (10-15 mins) to analyse and generate statistics based on your usage data.
It starts showing your monthly kubernetes costs, monthly savings, cost inefficiency etc., including cost of running kubecost pods itself.