How to calculate the cost of each Pod in an Kubernetes instance

Question

Hello everyone,

I have a shared use architecture in Azure, I have a need to pass on the costs of each of the resources used by a user.

The issue currently involves Kubernetes, where we have several Pod's and each of them is the domain of a specific acronym that uses the infrastructure of the shared architecture.

Based on this scenario, I need to pass the costs of each Pod to the responsible parties, but I can't get to this level of cost segregation by Azure Cost Manager.

Summarizing the whole context, I would like to know if there is any way to access the costs of each of the Pod's contained in a Kubernetes instance.

Answer 1

Hello @Caio de Oliveira Lopes ,

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to answer your question.

I understand you are looking for a way to calculate the cost incurred per pod in your AKS infrastructure. Let me just give you a brief understanding of what and how exactly AKS is charged.

As for the service, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a free container service & what you would be paying is only for the virtual machines, associated storage and networking resources consumed in the AKS cluster.

Pods always run on nodes. A Node is a worker machine in Azure Kubernetes and is a VM. Each VM may be running one more pods. We don't have a way to calculate the pricing based on the usage of each Pod.

Additional recommendations:
In case of budget constraint or shared infra looking for cost effective solutions, we recommend opting one of the cost savings options catered to your workload needs as suggested the following Azure pricing link kubernetes-service

Save up to 72% on pay-as-you-go prices with 1-year or 3-year Reserved Virtual Machine Instances. Reserved Instances are great for applications with steady-state usage and applications that require reserved capacity. Learn more about Reserved VM Instances pricing.

You could take a look at the AKS pricing calculator for more details calculator

Other Pricing reference: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/

Hope this helps!

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