What is Kubecost and how to integrate kubecost with kubernetes

How to integrate kubecost within your kubernetes cluster

What is Kubecost ?

Kubernetes is a popular open-source container orchestration platform used for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Managing costs in a Kubernetes environment can be complex due to the dynamic nature of containerized workloads.

Kubecost provides insights into resource utilization, allowing users to understand how resources are being utilized by different applications and teams within the cluster. This information is crucial for optimizing infrastructure usage and controlling costs, especially in large and complex Kubernetes deployments.

Install kubecost within a kubernetes cluster The following helm command will install kubecost in a namespace called kubecost

helm upgrade --install kubecost \
  --repo https://kubecost.github.io/cost-analyzer/ cost-analyzer \
  --namespace kubecost --create-namespace

You should now be able to access kubecost dashboard by port-forwarding as follows:

kubectl port-forward --namespace kubecost deployment/kubecost-cost-analyzer 9090
Access kubecost at http://127.0.0.1:9090

But now you might want to make this kubecost dashboard accessible by a url. Inorder to have an end-point for kubecost first you need to create a DNS Record and point it as an alias to the Load balancer of the ingress-nginx-controller service in your kubernetes cluster.

Get the load-balancer details by getting the ingress service, in this case we are using nginx ingress controller :

kubectl get svc -n <ingress-namespace>

Create an AWS Route53 DNS record "kubecost.dev.company.com" for an existing hosted zone : dev.company.com and during the creation make it an alias pointing to your load balancer that you got in the previous step.

Now you should be able to access your kubecost dashboard using the url : http://kubecost.dev.company.com