Key features
- Real-time cost allocation — APAC namespace/deployment/pod cost attribution
- Prometheus export — APAC cost metrics for Grafana dashboards and alerting
- AWS/GCP/Azure — cloud provider pricing API integration for APAC node costs
- Spot/preemptible support — APAC spot instance pricing for accurate allocation
- Custom pricing — APAC on-premises Kubernetes CPU/memory cost rate configuration
- OpenCost spec — vendor-neutral APAC Kubernetes cost allocation standard (CNCF)
Best for
- APAC platform teams wanting free Kubernetes cost allocation — OpenCost provides APAC namespace and deployment cost attribution without Kubecost or CloudHealth commercial licensing
- APAC teams already using Prometheus/Grafana stack — OpenCost Prometheus metrics integrate directly into existing APAC observability dashboards without a separate APAC cost UI
- APAC organizations standardizing on CNCF open-source tooling — OpenCost is the CNCF standard for Kubernetes cost allocation across APAC cloud providers and on-premises
Limitations to know
- ! No built-in APAC savings recommendations — OpenCost measures APAC cost allocation; rightsizing, idle resource detection, and APAC reservation recommendations require Kubecost or commercial FinOps tools
- ! Limited APAC multi-cluster UI — OpenCost provides per-cluster APAC cost API; APAC multi-cluster cost aggregation requires Kubecost commercial or custom APAC Grafana federation
- ! APAC cloud billing data lag — OpenCost uses list pricing with cloud provider discounts requiring custom APAC price book configuration; actual APAC billed cost may differ from OpenCost estimates
About OpenCost
OpenCost is a CNCF open-source Kubernetes cost allocation specification and reference implementation that measures and attributes cloud infrastructure spend to Kubernetes workloads in real time — where OpenCost runs as a Kubernetes deployment in APAC clusters, queries the cloud provider pricing API to get the cost of underlying APAC EC2/GCE/VM nodes, and allocates that cost to APAC namespaces, deployments, pods, and services based on actual CPU, memory, and storage resource consumption.
OpenCost's allocation model — where APAC platform teams query OpenCost's API to see per-namespace, per-deployment, or per-label cost breakdowns (e.g., `apac-payments` namespace: $2,340/mo, `apac-kyc` deployment: $780/mo) with costs derived from actual APAC Kubernetes resource requests and limits against real cloud provider node pricing — provides APAC engineering and FinOps teams cost attribution data that answers 'which APAC team or service is consuming cloud budget' without requiring APAC teams to tag every cloud resource manually.
OpenCost's Prometheus integration — where OpenCost exports Kubernetes cost metrics (`opencost_*`) to Prometheus, enabling APAC platform teams to build Grafana dashboards showing APAC cost trends over time, set Prometheus alerts when APAC namespace spend exceeds budget, and join APAC cost data with application performance metrics — provides APAC platform teams cost observability in the same APAC monitoring stack as infrastructure and application metrics.
OpenCost's cloud provider support — where OpenCost natively integrates with AWS (EC2 pricing API, spot instance pricing for APAC spot nodes), Google Cloud (Compute Engine pricing for APAC GKE nodes), and Azure (VM pricing for APAC AKS nodes), with custom pricing support for APAC on-premises Kubernetes deployments specifying custom APAC CPU and memory cost rates — provides APAC organizations across cloud providers and APAC hybrid deployments a single open-source APAC cost allocation standard.
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