User Guide

Kubernetes Costs

Split a cluster's real cloud bill across namespaces, node pools, and workloads — answer 'what does this namespace cost?' without a separate tool.

How allocation works#

A managed cluster (AKS, EKS, GKE) shows up on the bill as its node resources — one billable figure. CCO takes that real cluster cost and distributes it across what runs inside, using each workload's declared CPU and memory requests (weighted 50/50):

  • ✓Cluster — the real, billable cluster cost (the amount you're actually charged)
  • ✓Node pools — the cluster cost split by node pool
  • ✓Namespaces — the cluster cost split by namespace
  • ✓Workloads — the cluster cost split down to individual deployments and stateful sets
The same money, re-sliced
The namespace, node-pool, and workload figures are the cluster's cost cut a different way — never additional spend. CCO keeps them separate from the countable total so Kubernetes cost never double-counts against your bill.

What it needs#

Allocation reads two things: the cluster's cost from your cost data, and each workload's resource requests from Cloud Map's topology discovery.

Note
Per-namespace and per-workload splitting is proportional to CPU/memory requests. Workloads that declare no requests can't be split — the cluster and node-pool totals are still exact, and the breakdown fills in once requests are set on your deployments.

Which month you're seeing#

The K8s Costs page states the month its figures cover. Cluster spend is “sticky” month to month, so when a new month hasn't finished syncing yet, the page shows the most recent complete month and labels it — rather than reading empty or passing last month's number off as the current one.

Where Kubernetes cost appears#

  • ✓K8s Costs page — cluster, node-pool, namespace, and workload breakdown with a per-cluster table
  • ✓K8s Recommendations — idle namespaces, over/under-provisioned workloads, node-pool sizing, spot/preemptible opportunities
  • ✓Cost Explorer — group by tag:k8s_cluster to slice Kubernetes spend alongside everything else
  • ✓Reports — the Kubernetes Cost report totals cluster rows only
Tip
Kubernetes cost allocation ties three modules together: Cloud Map discovers the workloads, Cloud Pulse supplies utilization metrics, and Cost Optimizer maps the cluster bill onto them — driving the right-sizing recommendations.