Today, we are announcing the support for Kubernetes Workload metering in the OpenMeter collector. With this release, you can meter Pod, CPU, Memory, and Persistent Volume allocation seconds for Kubernetes workload, and use the metered data for usage-based billing and invoicing. Making it easy to monetize customer workloads running on Kubernetes.
Customer Workloads Run on Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that has become a go-to solution for companies across industries to run customer workloads on demand. In business models where compute power is sold as a service and priced by usage, Kubernetes provides the flexibility and scalability to handle diverse tasks from batch processing to AI model training on GPUs and even real-time game servers.
What is the OpenMeter Collector?
The OpenMeter Collector is a standalone application you can install in your Kubernetes cluster to meter resource usage, such as Pod runtime CPU, memory, and storage allocation.
The OpenMeter collector also supports:
- Metering Kubernetes workloads
- Metering Run:ai GPU workloads
- Converting Prometheus metrics to metered usage
- Importing usage from PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and other databases
Once collected, this data is turned into billable usage events and processed through OpenMeter's platform. From there, you can price, invoice, and track revenue.
What Kubernetes Usage Can You Meter?
OpenMeter collects detailed resource usage from Kubernetes workloads, including:
- Pod Allocation Time: Total time of Pods running on a per-second accuracy
- CPU Core Allocation Time: CPU Core-seconds CPU usage over
- Memory Gigabyte Allocation Time: Gigabyte-seconds memory usage
- GPU Allocation Time: GPU-seconds usage
- Persistent Volume Allocation Time: Gigabyte-seconds storage usage
This helps with cost visibility, chargebacks, and metered billing.
How to Price Workloads
The way you charge for GPU usage depends on the workload. Here are a few common models:
- Per SKUs: Create SKUs by CPU, Memory, and Disk (like m5.large) and price accordingly
- Per Resource: Bill for resources separately like CPU-core-seconds and GB-seconds
For example, the cloud provides prices for VMs per SKU and for serverless workloads per resource, such as CPU seconds. OpenMeter's product catalog supports both.
How OpenMeter Helps
With OpenMeter and Kubernetes, you can:
- Track usage data at a fine-grained level
- Meter the customer's CPU, Memory, and Storage usage
- Use a no-code catalog to price each resource
- Generate invoices automatically after usage
- Support enterprise contracts with tiered pricing or commitments
- Set tenant limits and usage thresholds
All of this runs in your infrastructure and integrates with your payment providers and CRM systems.
Check out the OpenMeter Kubernetes Collector to monetize customer workload.
