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 designated by setting the Helm flag .Values.federatedETL.primaryCluster=true, which instructs this cluster to read from the combined folder that was processed by the federator. This cluster will consume additional resources to run the Kubecost UI and backend.

As of Kubecost 1.108, agent health is monitored by a diagnostic pod that collects information from the local cluster and sends it to an object-store. This data is then processed by the Primary cluster and accessed via the UI and API.

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 primary 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

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