Showback and chargeback shared AKS clusters

In economics, the tragedy of the commons is characterized by individuals having unrestricted access to resources, resulting in overuse and depletion to the detriment of society. This same issue can be seen with shared computing resources, with application owners believing that cloud infrastructure is limitless and practically free. This can lead to over-provisioning and underutilization, which is why there needs to be a shared understanding of accountability among the finance department, DevOps, software developers, and application owners.

Implementing a chargeback program for an AKS cluster requires the following steps, shown in Figure 10.9:

Figure 10.9 – The chargeback program steps

While we have talked about allocating costs for an AKS cluster using Kubecost, we haven’t yet discussed showback and chargeback. In the following example, we have an AKS cluster hosting two workloads – Azure...