Our Container Cost Allocation project focuses on creating guidance and best practices to practitioners around allocating cost of containers.
This first output provides suggested container labels that are ready to use and can be combined into useful schemas. We also want this resource to encourage community debate about container cost allocation labeling, schemas, and best practices, inspiring contribution and future improvements.
During the September 2022 Summit, the Working Group presented their container cost allocation label schema tool.
Our group decided to transform the most important parts of that presentation into an interactive tool for our FinOps community.
Use this interactive dictionary to learn common container labeling that the Working Group (WG) has sourced from community contributions. Use combinations of these dictionary cards to build out schemas, and to learn of possible mapping variants via “Label alias”, where similarly named labels might have similar purposes to one distinct label.
NOTE: Container Cost Allocation labeling and schema may greatly differ between different organizations with different use cases, goals, optimizations, and cloud service providers. The goal here is to provide an opinionated example about how to tackle the challenge of allocating container costs.
Filter by FinOps Persona:
Filter by FinOps Maturity Level:
Check out our community documentation on FinOps Personas and Maturity Model for more information.
Context: App / Service Hierarchy
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: application, app, application-name, application-id
Example: ACME Fitness
Context: Business organization
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: psp-element, cost-center
Example: Can be seen as alpha-numeric codes
Context: Business organization
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: team, squad, group, owner, maintainer, contact
Example: [team name] [team id]
Context: App / Service Hierarchy
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: product, workload, project
Example: ACME Fitness Store, ACME Fitness + Video Streaming
Context: Business organization
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: business-unit, department, business-domain, domain
Example: retail BU, streaming BU
Context: Platform + Operations
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: stage, environment, env
Example: dev, staging, prod
Context: Business organization
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: customer
Example: [customer id] or [customer name]
Context: App / Service Hierarchy
Common Resources: pod, deployment
Aliases: service, service-id
Example: Point of Sale, Store Shopping Cart, Store Catalog
Context: App / Service Hierarchy
Common Resources: namespace, pod
Aliases: component, tier
Example: database, storage
Context: Platform + Operations
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: stack, servicegroup
Example: observability, build-tools, automation, security
Context: Business organization
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: TBD
Example: TBD
Context: Business organization
Common Resources: namespace, pod, deployment
Aliases: TBD
Example: TBD
FinOps practitioners can contribute in two ways. This collection of cards is maintained separately from the working group repository that handles more of the raw information and scripts. While we work on a future where we’ll source all of this content from one source of truth, everyone’s welcome to contribute to either of these repos.
In short:
We apologize for this temporary complication as the FinOps Foundation team improves contribution processes. Feel free to fill out issues to communicate your recommendations or Make a Suggestion to suggest edits to the site.
You can also get in touch with our WG via Community Slack channel if you have more questions or want to contribute, or add Issues on the Working Group’s GitHub repo.
Thanks for your patience as we improve how we welcome community contributions to our more advanced projects.
We welcome any and all community user stories on how to best allocate and manage container costs at scale. User stories will be featured as links on all of these cards and be part of the greater FinOps Foundation collection of stories.
Here’s an example of a User Story and how it connects with other similar User Stories. These stories help us add practical real-world flavor to these Working Group projects, showing how real practitioners solve real FinOps problems.
Get in touch with our WG via Community Slack channel if you’re interested!
Not a member yet? Request access and join the community!
The FinOps Foundation extends its gratitude to the hard-working members of the Working Group:
Lastly, a big thank you to the FinOps Foundation support team for helping us bring our work to life: Ashley Hromatko (Staff Sponsor), Samantha White (Program Management), Tom Sharpe (Design), and Andrew Nhem (Content).
