IBM Cloudability Feature

Container Cost Allocation

Get visibility and allocate cost for Kubernetes clusters

The rapid adoption of containers for deploying software applications has added complexity to cloud financial management. Containers are typically deployed within Kubernetes clusters, each one a multi-tenant environment that in any given month can be backed by thousands of ephemeral cloud resources. As a result, many cloud customers don’t have a shared understanding of what each cluster is costing day-to-day, let alone a reliable mechanism to split out these costs so they can be charged back to the business. IBM Cloudability’s Container Insights is designed to solve these exact challenges, with unmatched capabilities that bring financial accountability to this spend.

Automatically map cluster costs

IBM Cloudability automatically discovers all the cloud resources backing each of your Kubernetes clusters and maps this information back to detailed billing data. The Container Insights feature enables users to create specialized dashboards and intuitively explore resource usage down through the underlying nodes, workloads, and containers. This makes it straightforward to understand costs at each level and enables users to surface cost efficiency metrics to guide their optimization efforts.

Intelligently allocate spend

Sophisticated algorithms analyse resource utilisation metrics on each node – CPU, memory, network and disk – and evaluate pod level Quality of Service settings so that these cluster costs can be split out and fairly allocated across Kubernetes constructs of Namespaces and Labels.

These algorithms consider important factors including the instance family of the underlying VMs, matching the effective resource-cost weightings of each cloud vendor. Whether you are running Kubernetes on AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI, IBM Cloudability’s dedicated Container Insights brings cost visibility to all key infrastructure layers and helps engineers surface important implementation details for all nodes.

Fully Integrated Cost Management

As container-based cloud costs grow it’s increasingly important that they are included in regular financial management practices. With this in mind, the detailed container allocation information generated by Cloudability has been integrated into our core cost analytics platform.

Three container-specific reporting dimensions – Cluster Name, Namespace and Labels – are available for use throughout Cloudability. For example, they can be surfaced in reports, dashboards and True Cost Explorer alongside regular billing attributes to help build a complete picture of cloud spend.

See IBM Cloudability Features in Action

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