Because many businesses are hybrid, cost management can process multiple deployment scenarios simultaneously: cloud-only, OpenShift on cloud, on-premises OpenShift, and hybrid environments.

• The cloud-only user: You connect a cloud bill. You see your total cloud spend and you can filter by tags or accounts. Cost management provides visibility at the service level, for example, how much you spent on Amazon S3 or Azure Disk Storage.
• The OpenShift on cloud user: You connect your cloud bill and OpenShift cluster to correlate your OpenShift usage to infrastructure resources and costs. Cost management breaks down infrastructure costs further. The usage metrics you provide gives insight into which OpenShift projects and nodes are responsible for the source of your costs.
• The on-premise OpenShift user: You connect an OpenShift cluster and create a custom cost model. You see how your internal projects are consuming your physical server capacity and apply costs to them.
• The hybrid user: You connect cloud bills, on-premise clusters, and cost models. Cost management provides a single, unified view of your entire spend.

Cost management distributes cloud costs in the following way:

1. From your cloud bill, cost management takes the cost of all of your nodes and determines what nodes belong to what cluster and which nodes are worker or primary nodes.
2. Cost management then determines what pods are running on what cluster and namespace and calculates how much central processing units (CPU), memory, disk space, and PVCs each one uses.
3. Cost management attributes cloud bill costs to OpenShift clusters based on relative resource usage, which ensures costs are accurately distributed to each pod.
4. Use a cost model in cost management to apply a price list to OpenShift usage data. In addition, in a hybrid cloud environment a cost model can distribute cloud costs to OpenShift resources. Cost models are not required for public cloud data but can be used to add markups.