Metering Kubernetes Pod Execution Time

In this example, we will track the duration of a Pod running in Kubernetes with second-level accuracy. This functionality is valuable for applications that require accurate compute time attribution to users for billing or analytics purposes.

#Our Example

In this example, we will develop a Go application that runs within a Kubernetes cluster. This application polls the running containers across all namespaces every second, targeting Pods with a specific subject label. The application then reports the collected data to OpenMeter for further analysis and usage tracking.

To facilitate this example, we will build upon an official Kubernetes example that enables in-cluster API access.

kubectl create clusterrolebinding default-view --clusterrole=view --serviceaccount=default:default

If you plan to utilize this example in a production environment, it is crucial to ensure that only one instance of this code is running and that overreporting is avoided. Additionally, if your Kubernetes cluster runs a a large scale of pods, consider transforming this code into a DaemonSet where each instance runs on a single Kubernetes Node and manages Pods exclusively from that node to distribute load.

#Prerequisites

Source code for this example is available here.

Clone the OpenMeter repository and navigate to the example directory:

git clone [email protected]:openmeterio/openmeter.git
cd examples/ingest-kubernetes-pod-time-go

#Trying out locally

If you wish to try out this example locally, you can use minikube.

Follow these steps to install and start Minikube:

brew install minikube
minikube start

Run the following commands to deploy the required images:

minikube kubectl -- create clusterrolebinding default-view --clusterrole=view --serviceaccount=default:default
minikube image build  --file examples/ingest-kubernetes-pod-time-go/Dockerfile -t k8s-pod-time:latest ../..
minikube kubectl -- run hello --image=nginxdemos/hello --labels=subject=customer-1
minikube kubectl -- run k8s-pod-time-1 --image=k8s-pod-time:latest --image-pull-policy=Never
minikube kubectl -- logs -f k8s-pod-time-1

Check out the quickstart guide to see how to run OpenMeter.