You can use cost models in cost management to apply a price to usage in your hybrid cloud environment, then distribute the costs to resources.

The following terms are important for understanding the cost management cost model workflow:

Cost model

A cost model is a framework that defines the calculations that cost management uses for costs. Cost models use raw costs and metrics to help you with budgeting, accounting, visualization, and analysis. In cost management, cost models provide the basis for your cost information and enable you to record, categorize, and allocate costs to specific customers, business units, or projects.

Count-based costs

A charge applied per unit of a specific resource, such as persistent volume claims, nodes, or clusters. You are charged for each individual element identified. For example, if you charge $10 per node and your environment has 10 nodes, the final charge is $100.

Distributed costs

The costs calculated by the cost model that get distributed to higher level application concepts such as projects, accounts, and services. The cost type in the cost model, either infrastructure or supplementary, determines how costs are distributed.

Effective usage

The pod resources that are used or requested each hour, whichever value is higher

Infrastructure raw cost

The portion of a Hyperscaler’s cost that is matched to your OpenShift usage. This cost is identified by direct resource matching or special OpenShift tags.

Markup

The portion of cost that is calculated by applying markup or discount to infrastructure raw cost in cost management. For example, if you have a raw cost of $100 and a markup of 10%, the markup is $10 and the cost is $110.

Monthly cost

The portion of cost calculated by applying monthly price list rates to metrics that are returned as part of usage cost. Monthly cost can be configured for OpenShift nodes or clusters in a cost model to account for subscription costs and are displayed as part of the usage costs in the cost management API and interface. For example, for an OpenShift cluster with 10 nodes at a rate of $10,000 per node per month, the monthly cost is $100,000.

Note

Monthly costs are distributed evenly throughout the billing period.

Price list

A list of rates used in a cost model to calculate the usage cost of resources

Request

The pod resources that were requested according to OpenShift

Distributed costs

The costs calculated by the cost model that get distributed to higher level application concepts such as projects, accounts, and services. The cost type in the cost model, either infrastructure or supplementary, determines how costs are distributed.

Usage cost

The portion of cost calculated by applying hourly or monthly price list rates to metrics. For example, if a metric has 100 core-hours and a rate of $1 per core-hour, the usage cost is $100