Today Vantage announces the launch of Kubernetes support: the ability for customers in Business and Custom tiers using AWS Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) to see Kubernetes service level costs. Vantage will now retrieve and display cost data for services running on EKS clusters within their AWS accounts. Vantage users can view service level costs for EKS clusters by clicking into "costs by resource" on a Cost Report for a specific EKS cluster and then clicking "cost by service" for that cluster.
Previously, AWS customers running multiple teams' workloads on EKS clusters would have to take guesses or do advanced calculations to understand the cost of each Kubernetes service. Vantage previously displayed the cost for the EKS control plane and EC2 nodes but did not give granularity of costs down to running Kubernetes services within that cluster. Additionally, there was no way of seeing the cost of un-utilized portions of an EKS cluster.
Now, Vantage will show service costs for each EKS cluster for all EKS customers. Vantage will join together information present in Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), Container Insights and EKS Service APIs to give you cost insights for services running in your Kubernetes cluster. Customers can view day-by-day accrued costs data for each EKS service. Additionally, customers can see the cost of un-utilized cluster space for making cluster rightsizing decisions.
To see EKS service costs, login to the Vantage console and head to your EKS Clusters under the "All Resources" Cost Report. To view service level costs, click into a specific EKS Cluster.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today, Vantage is launching service level cost support for Amazon EKS. Vantage customers in the Business and Custom tiers can now see Kubernetes service level costs for services running within EKS clusters.
A Kubernetes service is abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods as a network service. You can read more about them here.
2. Who is the customer?
The customer is any AWS customer who have active EKS clusters subscribed to the Vantage Business or Custom tiers. This feature is not available for Vantage users in Starter or Pro tiers.
3. What is required to enable this feature?
There are two things a customer must enable and integrate with Vantage to see EKS service costs listed below.
- Enable Per-Resource Costs on their Vantage account.
- Enable Container Insights for EKS Clusters in which they want to see service level costs.
You can visit your workspaces page instructions on how to enable service level costs for a cluster.
4. What are Per-Resource Costs?
Turning on Per-Resource Costs allows customers to see cost breakdowns for each service by resource and by sub-category. This is done by ingesting AWS Cost and Usage Reports. Cost and Usage Reports, abbreviated as "CUR", are raw lightly structured billing events that AWS gives you the ability to export. Vantage offers a seamless way of enabling Per-Resource Costs here.
5. What is Container Insights?
Container Insights is a feature offered by AWS that allows structured logging for container services including ECS, EKS and Fargate. Here is a full post on how this works.
6. I have many EKS clusters, do I have to enable Per-Resource Costs and container insights for each?
You will need to enable container insights for each EKS Cluster you'd like to see service-level costs for. You will only need to enable Per-Resource Costs once for your AWS root account or for each of your AWS member accounts. The Vantage console is aware of what permissions and resources it is lacking to be able to provide service-level costs for EKS and provide you with in-console guides and assistance for enabling this.
7. I run self-managed Kubernetes on EC2 and/or on-premise in my own environment. Can I leverage this feature?
No. At this time, this feature is only available for Amazon EKS customers. Though we are looking at additional support for self-managed Kubernetes on AWS.
8. How much does this cost?
There is no additional cost to service-level support for Kubernetes on Vantage but this feature is only available to users in our Business and Custom tiers.
9. What costs will my AWS account incur by having to provide CUR and Container Insights for this feature?
Depending on the amount of pods you are running the costs will vary. You will be charged the storage of the CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Metrics Container Insights generates. You will also be charged for the API calls to CloudWatch Insights which Vantage is making in order to collect the required data. We estimate about $.01 per day per pod deployed on your cluster.
10. I am part of a team, will everyone on my team have access to this feature?
Yes.
11. Will I be able to see Kubernetes level service-level costs in cost notifications?
No, not at this time, but is something we are considering in the future.
12. Are service-level costs available through the Cost Reports API?
No, not at this time, but we are looking to expand our API to offer this level of detail.
13. Will you provide a similar feature set for ECS on EC2?
Yes. This is coming soon. Please keep an eye out.
14. Will you provide a similar feature set for ECS on Fargate?
This is already live. If you are a customer who has enabled Per-Resource Costs, you can see the cost of each individual Fargate service.
15. How do I enable Container Insights on my EKS Cluster?
Please follow the instructions maintained by AWS here.
