AWS Out of Cluster

Integrating Kubecost with your AWS data provides the ability to allocate out-of-cluster (OOC) costs, e.g. RDS instances and S3 buckets, back to Kubernetes concepts like namespace and deployment as well as reconcile cluster assets back to your billing data. The latter is especially helpful when teams are using Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, or Enterprise Discounts. All billing data remains on your cluster when using this functionality and is not shared externally. Read our Cloud Integrations doc for more information on how Kubecost connects with Cloud Service Providers.

The following guide provides the steps required for enabling OOC costs allocation and accurate pricing, e.g. reserved instance price allocation. In a multi-account organization, all of the following steps will need to be completed in the payer account.

Step 1: Create an AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and integrate it with Kubecost

You can learn how to perform this using our AWS Cloud Integration doc.

Step 2: Tag your resources

Kubecost utilizes AWS tagging to allocate the costs of AWS resources outside of the Kubernetes cluster to specific Kubernetes concepts, such as namespaces, pods, etc. These costs are then shown in a unified dashboard within the Kubecost interface.

To allocate external AWS resources to a Kubernetes concept, use the following tag naming scheme:

Kubernetes Concept	AWS Tag Key	AWS Tag Value
Cluster	kubernetes_cluster	cluster-name
Namespace	kubernetes_namespace	namespace-name
Deployment	kubernetes_deployment	deployment-name
Label	kubernetes_label_NAME*	label-value
DaemonSet	kubernetes_daemonset	daemonset-name
Pod	kubernetes_pod	pod-name
Container	kubernetes_container	container-name

In the kubernetes_label_NAME tag key, the NAME portion should appear exactly as the tag appears inside of Kubernetes. For example, for the tag app.kubernetes.io/name, this tag key would appear as kubernetes_label_app.kubernetes.io/name.

To use an alternative or existing AWS tag schema, you may supply these in your values.yaml under kubecostProductConfigs.labelMappingConfigs.\<aggregation\>\_external_label. Also be sure to set kubecostProductConfigs.labelMappingConfigs.enabled=true.

For more information, consult AWS' Tag your Amazon EC2 resources.

Tags may take several hours to show up in the Cost Allocations Tags section described in the next step.

Custom tags mapping

Tags that contain : in the key may be converted to _ in the Kubecost UI due to Prometheus readability. To use AWS Label Mapping Configs, use this mapping format:

kubecostProductConfigs:
  labelMappingConfigs:
    enabled: true
    namespace_external_label: mycompanybilling_namespace
    cluster_external_label: mycompanybilling_cluster

To view examples of common label mapping configs, see here.

Step 3: Enable user-defined cost allocation tags

In order to make the custom Kubecost AWS tags appear on the CURs, and therefore in Kubecost, individual cost allocation tags must be enabled. Details on which tags to enable can be found in Step 2.

For instructions on enabling user-defined cost allocation tags, consult AWS' Activating user-defined cost allocation tags

Viewing account-level tags

Account-level tags are applied (as labels) to all the Assets built from resources defined under a given AWS account. You can filter AWS resources in the Kubecost Assets View (or API) by account-level tags by adding them ('tag:value') in the Label/Tag filter.

If a resource has a label with the same name as an account-level tag, the resource label value will take precedence.

Modifications incurred on account-level tags may take several hours to update on Kubecost.

Your AWS account will need to support the organizations:ListAccounts and organizations:ListTagsForResource policies to benefit from this feature.

Troubleshooting

• In the Kubecost UI, view the Allocations dashboard. If external costs are not shown, open your browser's Developer Tools > Console to see any reported errors.

• Query Athena directly to ensure data is available. Note: it can take up to 6 hours for data to be written.

• You may need to upgrade your AWS Glue if you are running an old version. See Upgrading to the AWS Glue Data Catalog step-by-step for more info.

• Finally, review pod logs from the cost-model container in the cost-analyzer pod and look for auth errors or Athena query results.