GCP Cloud Integration
Kubecost provides the ability to allocate out of cluster (OOC) costs, e.g. Cloud SQL instances and Cloud Storage buckets, back to Kubernetes concepts like namespaces and deployments.
Read the Cloud Billing Integrations doc for more information on how Kubecost connects with cloud service providers.
The following guide provides the steps required for allocating OOC costs in GCP.
GCP users should create a detailed billing export to gain access to all Kubecost cloud integration features including reconciliation.
If your Big Query dataset is in a different project than the one where Kubecost is installed, please see the section on Cross-Project Service Accounts.
Add a service account key to allocate OOC resources (e.g. storage buckets and managed databases) back to their Kubernetes owners. The service account needs the following:
roles/bigquery.user
roles/compute.viewer
roles/bigquery.dataViewer
roles/bigquery.jobUser
If you don't already have a GCP service account with the appropriate rights, you can run the following commands in your command line to generate and export one. Make sure your GCP project is where your external costs are being run.
export PROJECT_ID=$(gcloud config get-value project)
gcloud iam service-accounts create compute-viewer-kubecost --display-name "Compute Read Only Account Created For Kubecost" --format json
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/compute.viewer
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/bigquery.user
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/bigquery.dataViewer
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/bigquery.jobUser
After creating the GCP service account, you can connect it to Kubecost in one of two ways before configuring:
You can set up an IAM policy binding to bind a Kubernetes service account to your GCP service account as seen below, where:
NAMESPACE
is the namespace Kubecost is installed intoKSA_NAME
is the name of the service account attributed to the Kubecost deployment
gcloud iam service-accounts add-iam-policy-binding [email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/iam.workloadIdentityUser --member "serviceAccount:$PROJECT_ID.svc.id.goog[NAMESPACE/KSA_NAME]"
Create a service account key:
gcloud iam service-accounts keys create ./compute-viewer-kubecost-key.json --iam-account [email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com
Once the GCP service account has been connected, set up the remaining configuration parameters.
You're almost done. Now it's time to configure in Kubecost to finalize your connectivity.
It is recommended to provide the GCP details in your values.yaml to ensure they are retained during an upgrade or redeploy. First, set the following configs:
kubecostProductConfigs:
projectID: "$PROJECT_ID"
bigQueryBillingDataDataset: "YOUR_DATASET.YOUR_TABLE_NAME"
If you've connected using Workload Identity federation, add these configs:
# Ensure Kubecost deployment runs on nodes that use Workload Identity
nodeSelector:
iam.gke.io/gke-metadata-server-enabled: "true"
# Add annotations to all kubecost-related serviceaccounts
serviceAccount:
annotations:
iam.gke.io/gcp-service-account: "[email protected]$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com"
Otherwise, if you've connected using a service account key, create a secret for the GCP service account key you've created and add the following configs:
kubectl create secret generic gcp-secret -n kubecost --from-file=./compute-viewer-kubecost-key.json
kubecostProductConfigs:
gcpSecretName: "gcp-secret"
When managing the service account key as a Kubernetes secret, the secret must reference the service account key JSON file, and that file must be named compute-viewer-kubecost-key.json.
In Kubecost, select Settings from the left navigation, and under Cloud Integrations, select Add Cloud Integration > GCP, then provide the relevant information in the GCP Billing Data Export Configuration window:
- GCP Service Key: If you've connected using Workload Identity federation in Step 3, you should leave this box empty. If you've created a service account key, copy the contents of the compute-viewer-kubecost-key.json file and paste them here.
- GCP Project Id: The ID of your GCP project.
- GCP Billing Database: Requires a BigQuery dataset prefix (e.g.
billing_data
) in addition to the BigQuery table name. A full example isbilling_data.gcp_billing_export_v1_018AIF_74KD1D_534A2
Be careful when handling your service key! Ensure you have entered it correctly into Kubecost. Don't lose it or let it become publicly available.
You can now label assets with the following schema to allocate costs back to their appropriate Kubernetes owner. Learn more here on updating GCP asset labels.
Cluster: "kubernetes_cluster" : <clusterID>
Namespace: "kubernetes_namespace" : <namespace>
Deployment: "kubernetes_deployment": <deployment>
Label: "kubernetes_label_NAME": <label>
Pod: "kubernetes_pod": <pod>
Daemonset: "kubernetes_daemonset": <daemonset>
Container: "kubernetes_container": <container>
To use an alternative or existing label schema for GCP cloud assets, you may supply these in your values.yaml under the
kubecostProductConfigs.labelMappingConfigs.<aggregation>_external_label
.Google generates special labels for GKE resources (e.g. "goog-gke-node", "goog-gke-volume"). Values with these labels are excluded from OOC costs because Kubecost already includes them as in-cluster assets. Thus, to make sure all cloud assets are included, we recommend installing Kubecost on each cluster where insights into costs are required.
Project-level labels are applied to all the Assets built from resources defined under a given GCP project. You can filter GCP resources in the Kubecost Cloud Costs Explorer (or API).
If a resource has a label with the same name as a project-level label, the resource label value will take precedence.
Modifications incurred on project-level labels may take several hours to update on Kubecost.
Due to organizational constraints, it is common that Kubecost must be run in a separate project from the project containing the billing data Big Query dataset which is needed for Cloud Integration. It is still possible to configure Kubecost in this scenario, but some of the values in the above script will need to be changed. First you will need the project id of the projects where Kubecost is installed and where the Big Query dataset is located. Additionally you will need a GCP user with the permissions
iam.serviceAccounts.setIamPolicy
for the Kubecost project and the ability to manage the roles listed above for the Big Query Project. With these, fill in the following script to set the relevant variables:export KUBECOST_PROJECT_ID=<Project ID where kubecost is installed>
export BIG_QUERY_PROJECT_ID=<Project ID where bigquery data is stored>
export SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME=<Unique name for your service account>
Once these values have been set, this script can be run and will create the service account needed for this configuration.
gcloud config set project $KUBECOST_PROJECT_ID
gcloud iam service-accounts create $SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME --display-name "Cross Project CUR" --format json
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $BIG_QUERY_PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$KUBECOST_PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/compute.viewer
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $BIG_QUERY_PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$KUBECOST_PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/bigquery.user
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $BIG_QUERY_PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$KUBECOST_PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/bigquery.dataViewer
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $BIG_QUERY_PROJECT_ID --member serviceAccount:[email protected]$KUBECOST_PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com --role roles/bigquery.jobUser
Now that your service account is created, follow the normal configuration instructions.
There are cases where labels applied at the account label do not show up in the date-partitioned data. If account level labels are not showing up, you can switch to querying them unpartitioned by setting an extraEnv in Kubecost:
GCP_ACCOUNT_LABELS_NOT_PARTITIONED: true
. See here.Last modified 6d ago