Tech Preview: Get visibility into your OpenShift costs across your hybrid infrastructure

Do you know if your OpenShift project is currently on budget? If you deploy more containers right now or if OpenShift dynamically increases capacity, would that put your project in the red? 

Red Hat is introducing a new cost management SaaS offering that is included at no additional charge with your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscription. Cost management is an OpenShift Container Platform service that is currently available in Technology Preview. The service, which customers access from cloud.redhat.com/beta, gives you visibility into your costs across on-premises and cloud environments. 

With cost management for OpenShift, you can easily aggregate costs across hybrid cloud infrastructure (on-premises, Amazon Web Services, Azure, with more cloud platforms on the roadmap) and track budget requirements.

It’s easy to get started with AWS and Azure - just configure your cloud account to provide the required information and add it as a source for cost management. A unique benefit to Red Hat's service is can also add your on-premises environments if you’re running OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 with metering. For more details, see the “Getting Started with Cost Management” guide.

Once you have your sources set up, you may want to take cost management to the next level with more advanced features. Cost models allow you to apply markup ratios to reflect the real costs of running an environment.

But one of the most powerful features is the use of tagging to map charges to projects and organizations. Tags are used for many things, not just cost management, and your organization may already have a taxonomy for tagging and/or naming. Our own cost management product manager, Sergio Ocón-Cárdenas, wrote a blog with some best practice guidelines for tagging, so take a look at that before jumping into the documentation for “Managing cost data using tagging.”

As I mentioned, cost management is still Tech Preview which means we’re providing early access to a feature that is not supported through normal channels. We are giving you the ability to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. So give cost management a try, and if you have any questions or suggestions, please email costmanagement@redhat.com.