Red Hat Lightspeed cost management calculates the cost of your infrastructure by matching price to usage. To use cost management, you provide data from one or both of these categories depending on your business goals.

Cost management is a processing engine that uses the following flow:

• Identify costs: What do you pay?
  • Cloud billing integration: Connect your AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud bill. Cost management pulls your actual spending, including specific discounts, savings plans, and reserved instance rates. Note
    If you are a Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) or an Azure Red Hat Openshift customer (ARO), the cost of your ROSA or ARO subscription is included in the cloud bill and cost management automatically distributes it to your workloads. However, due to limitations in the data that AWS accepts from the Red Hat Subscriptions service, for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS Hosted Control Plane (ROSA HCP) subscriptions, you must create a cost model that includes some rates.Red Hat is working to resolve this issue.
  • Custom cost models: Create a price list within cost management to define what resources should cost. This is the only source of costs for on-premise environments. You can also use cost models to add overhead costs such as labor, licensing, or security to your cloud spend or distribute specific costs such as worker unallocated costs to your OpenShift projects.
• Identify OpenShift resource usage: What clusters do you have metrics for? The cost management operator collects usage information from the cluster.

Cost management does not use public prices. Instead, it reads your cloud bill to process the savings plans, reserved instances, discounts, or other costs that you have. Cost management also tracks which nodes run on which pods. If you have different instance types, or the same instance types but with different prices, cost management can still attribute the correct cost to each pod.