Set Up Cloud Cost Management for Kubernetes

Updated 1 week ago by Archana Singh

Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM) monitors the cloud costs of your Kubernetes clusters, namespaces, nodes, workloads, and labels. CCM also allows you to optimize your Kubernetes cluster resources using intelligent cloud AutoStopping rules.

You need to provide different permissions depending on the features that you enable for your Kubernetes clusters. CCM offers the following features:

Cost Visibility (Required)

This feature is available by default and provides the following capabilities:

  • Insights into cluster costs by pods, namespace, workloads, etc.
  • Idle and unallocated cluster costs
  • Workload recommendations
  • Root cost analysis using cost perspectives
  • Cost anomaly detection
  • Governance using budgets and forecasts
  • Alert users using Email and Slack notification

Kubernetes optimization using AutoStopping rules (Optional)

This feature allows you to enable Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping for Kubernetes. For more information, see Create AutoStopping Rules for AWS.

  • Works for custom resources, EKS, AKS, GKE, etc.
  • Orchestrate VMs based on idleness
  • Provides granular savings visibility

This topic describes how to connect your Kubernetes cluster to CCM.

Once you enable CCM, for the first cluster the data is available within a few minutes for viewing and analysis. However, you will not see the idle cost because of the lack of utilization data. CCM generates the last 30 days of the cost data based on the first events.

From the second cluster onwards, it takes about 2–3 hours for the data to be available for viewing and analysis.

In this topic:

Review: Kubernetes Connector Requirements

  • For CCM, Kubernetes connectors are available only at the Account level in Harness.
  • For the CCM Kubernetes connector, you need to first create a Cloud Provider K8s Connector and then create a K8s Cloud Cost Connector. You simply reference the Cloud Provider K8s Connector in the CCM Kubernetes connector.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have the following set up before you create a Kubernetes connector for CCM:

  • Ensure that you have access to your Kubernetes cluster.

  • Ensure that you have added a Kubernetes Cluster in Cloud Providers Connector. See Add a Kubernetes Cluster Connector.
    Set up your Kubernetes Cluster

    You'll need a target Kubernetes cluster for the Harness Delegate and deployment. Ensure your cluster meets the following requirements:

    • Number of nodes: 2.
    • vCPUs, Memory, Disk Size: 4vCPUs, 16GB memory, 100GB disk. In GKE, the e2-standard-4 machine type is enough for this quickstart.
    • Networking: outbound HTTPS for the Harness connection to app.harness.io, github.com, and hub.docker.com. Allow TCP port 22 for SSH.
    • A Kubernetes service account with permission to create entities in the target namespace is required. The set of permissions should include list, get, create, and delete permissions. In general, the cluster-admin permission or namespace admin permission is enough.
      For more information, see User-Facing Roles from Kubernetes.

    Delegate Size

    Your Kubernetes cluster must have unallocated resources required to run the Harness Delegate workload:

    • Laptop - 1.6GB memory, 0.5CPU
    • Small - 3.3GB memory, 1CPU
    • Medium - 6.6GB memory, 2CPU
    • Large - 13.2GB memory, 4CPU
    Important: these sizing requirements are for the Delegate only. Your cluster will require more memory for Kubernetes, the operating system, and other services. Ensure that the cluster has enough memory, storage, and CPU for all of its resource consumers.
  • Metrics Server: Metrics Server must be running on the Kubernetes cluster where your Harness Kubernetes Delegate is installed. Before enabling CCM for Kubernetes, you must ensure the utilization data for pods and nodes is available.
    Metrics Server is installed by default on GKE and AKS clusters, however, you need to install it on the AWS EKS cluster.
    Metrics Server is a cluster-wide aggregator of resource usage data. It collects resource metrics from kubelets and exposes them in the Kubernetes API server through Metrics API. CCM polls the utilization data every minute on the Delegate. The metrics are aggregated for 20 minutes and then CCM keeps one data point per 20 minutes. For more information, see Installing the Kubernetes Metrics Server from AWS.

    To install metrics server on your EKS clusters, run the following command:

    kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/releases/download/v0.5.0/components.yaml

Step: Connect Your Kubernetes Cluster to CCM

Perform the following steps to connect your Kubernetes cluster to CCM.

Step 1: Overview

  1. In Account Setup, in Account Resources, click Connectors.
  2. In Connectors, click + Connector.
  3. In Cloud Costs, click Kubernetes.
  4. In Kubernetes Connector, in Overview, enter the Name for your connector. The name will appear in CCM Explorer to identify this cluster.
  5. In Reference an existing connector, select your Kubernetes cluster connector from the drop-down list. See Add a Kubernetes Cluster Connector.
  6. Click Save and Continue.

Step 2: Feature Selection

In Choose Requirements, select the Cloud Cost Management features that you would like to enable for your Kubernetes clusters. Based on your selection Harness requires specific permissions.

You need to provide different permissions depending on the features that you enable for your Kubernetes clusters. CCM offers the following features:

Cost Visibility (Required)

This feature is available by default and provides the following capabilities:

  • Insights into cluster costs by pods, namespace, workloads, etc.
  • Idle and unallocated cluster costs
  • Workload recommendations
  • Root cost analysis using cost perspectives
  • Cost anomaly detection
  • Governance using budgets and forecasts
  • Alert users using Email and Slack notification

Kubernetes optimization using AutoStopping rules (Optional)

This feature allows you to enable Intelligent Cloud AutoStopping for Kubernetes. For more information, see Create AutoStopping Rules for AWS.

  • Works for custom resources, EKS, AKS, GKE, etc.
  • Orchestrate VMs based on idleness
  • Provides granular savings visibility

Make your selection and click Continue.

(Optional) Step 3: Create a Secret

The secret creation settings appear only if you have selected Kubernetes Optimization by AutoStopping feature in the Feature Selection step. In this step, you are providing permissions for intelligent cloud AutoStopping rules. For more information, see Create AutoStopping Rules for AWS.

  1. In Secret creation, click create an API key here and create an API key. See Create an API Key.
  2. Run the following commands in your Kubernetes cluster:
    1. Create a namespace.
      kubectl create namespace harness-autostopping
    2. In the following YAML, add the API token that you created (in step 1) and run the command in your K8s cluster.
      apiVersion: v1
      data:
          token: <paste token here>
      kind: Secret
      metadata:
          name: harness-api-key
          namespace: harness-autostopping
      type: Opaque
    3. Run the following command:
      kubectl apply -f secret.yaml
  3. Click Continue.

Step 4: Provide Permissions

  1. In Provide Permissions, click Download YAML.
  2. Copy the downloaded YAML to a machine where you have kubectlinstalled and have access to your Kubernetes cluster.
  3. Run the following command to apply the Harness Delegate to your Kubernetes Cluster.
    $ kubectl apply -f cost-optimisation-crd.yaml
  4. Click Done and Continue.
  5. In Verify connection, once the Test Connection succeeds, click Finish.

    The Connector is now listed in Connectors.

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