Kost

Kost is a tool built at Grafana Labs to estimate the cost of workloads running in our k8s clusters.

Caution

This is still highly experimental and somewhat tightly coupled to how Grafana Labs manages and monitors our k8s infrastructure. We'd love to support other teams and organizations, but do not have the bandwidth to implement it. If you want to adopt the tool, please fill out an issue and connect with us!

Requirements

kost is somewhat tightly coupled to how Grafana Labs manages our k8s environments. Specifically, the following assumptions need to be met:

• K8s resources defined in a standalone repository
  • We use jsonnet to define resources + tanka to generate the k8s manifest files and commit them to a kube-manifest repo + flux to deploy them to clusters
• Mimir to store opencost + cloudcost-exporter metrics for cost data
• Drone(soon to be GitHub Actions) to detect changes and run the cost report

While these are what we use internally and require, in theory the bot should work so long as you have:

1. Two manifest files that you can compare changes
2. Prometheus complient backend with cost metrics
3. A CI system to run the bot when changes happen

Prerequisites for local development

• HTTP access to a prometheus server that has OpenCost metrics available
• Clone grafana/kube-manifests
• Get a token for Mimir with Viewer privileges
  • dev: https://grafana-dev.com/orgs/raintank/api-keys
  • ops: https://grafana-ops.com/orgs/raintank/api-keys
• Create a yaml file with basic auth creds to use. Replace password with the token you created earlier.

basic_auth:
  username: <user>
  password: <password>

Running

There are two entrypoints that you can run:

• estimator
• bot

Estimator is a simple cli that accepts two manifest files and a set of clusters to generate the cost estimator for. Bot is what is ran in Drone today and requires the kube-manifest repository to be available locally.

Estimator

To check the cost on a single cluster, run the following command:

go run ./cmd/estimator/ \
  -from $PWD/pkg/costmodel/testdata/resource/Deployment.json \
  -to $PWD/pkg/costmodel/testdata/resource/Deployment-more-requests.json \
  -http.config.file /tmp/dev.yaml \
  -prometheus.address $PROMETHEUS_ADDRESS \
  <cluster>

To check the cost across multiple clusters, run the following command:

go run ./cmd/estimator/ \
  -from $PWD/pkg/costmodel/testdata/resource/Deployment.json \
  -to $PWD/pkg/costmodel/testdata/resource/Deployment-more-requests.json \
  -http.config.file /tmp/dev.yaml \
  -prometheus.address $PROMETHEUS_ADDRESS \
  <cluster-1> <cluster-2>

Kost(bot)

Set the following environment variables:

• KUBE_MANIFESTS_PATH: path to grafana/kube-manifests
• HTTP_CONFIG_FILE: path to configuration created in Prereqs
• PROMETHEUS_ADDRESS: mimir endpoint
• DRONE_PULL_REQUEST: GitHub PR to create comment on
• DRONE_BUILD_EVENT : set to pull_request
• GITHUB_TOKEN: set to a token that is able to comment on PRs
• CI: set to true

go run ./cmd/bot/

Debugging

• checkout the change in kube-manifests that you want to generate a cost estimate report for. This also includes to set master to the right hash.