Multi-Cluster

Kubecost Free can now be installed on an unlimited number of individual clusters. Larger teams will benefit from using Kubecost Enterprise to better manage many clusters. See pricing for more details.

Primary and secondary clusters

In an Enterprise multi-cluster setup, the UI is accessed through a designated primary cluster. All other clusters in the environment send metrics to a central object-store with a lightweight agent (aka secondary clusters). The primary cluster is the one running Aggregator. This cluster will consume additional resources to run the Kubecost UI and backend.

Because the UI is only accessible through the primary cluster, Helm flags related to UI display are not applied to secondary clusters.

Enterprise Federation

This feature is only supported for Kubecost Enterprise.

There are two methods to aggregate all cluster information back to a single Kubecost UI:

Both methods allow for greater compute efficiency by running the most resource-intensive workloads on a single primary cluster.

For environments that already have a Prometheus instance, ETL Federation may be preferred because only a single Kubecost pod is required.

The below diagrams highlight the two architectures:

Kubecost ETL Federation (Preferred)

Kubecost Thanos Federation

As of Kubecost v2.0, support for Thanos is deprecated. Consider transitioning to our Aggregator architecture if you plan to upgrade.

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