An OpenCostAllocationAPI property references an API endpoint that exposes Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure cost allocation data in a format compatible with the OpenCost Allocation API specification. The OpenCost API returns workload cost data aggregated by namespace, deployment, pod, service, or label, and supports time-window queries and shared cost distribution. Indexing an OpenCost-compatible allocation endpoint makes container cost data programmatically accessible to FinOps dashboards, chargeback tools, and engineering teams.

Also known as: OpenCost API, Kubernetes Cost Allocation API, Allocation Endpoint

Example

- type: OpenCostAllocationAPI
  url: https://developers.example.com/costs/allocation

Standards

• CNCF / OpenCost OpenCost Specification
• CNCF (Incubating) OpenCost project
• CNCF / OpenCost OpenCost API documentation
• CNCF / Prometheus Prometheus exposition format
• CNCF OpenMetrics
• CNCF / Kubernetes Kubernetes API

Media Types

• application/json — Primary response media type for OpenCost allocation queries.
• text/plain — Used for Prometheus metrics scraping (text exposition format).

OpenAPI Expression

• paths./allocation (OpenCost API) — Allocation endpoint accepts window, aggregate, and accumulate query parameters.
• paths./allocation/compute (OpenCost API) — On-demand allocation computation endpoint.
• paths./assets (OpenCost API) — Returns cluster-level asset cost data.

Governance Rules

• window-required (OpenCost API) — Allocation queries must specify a time window (e.g., '7d', '2024-01-01,2024-01-31').
• aggregate-known-keys (OpenCost API) — aggregate parameter must use supported keys (namespace, deployment, pod, controller, service, label:, etc.).
• idle-handling-declared (OpenCost Specification) — Responses should declare whether idle costs are included, shared, or excluded.
• shared-cost-explicit (OpenCost Specification) — Any shared-cost distribution policy applied to the response must be discoverable.

Risk & Compliance

Compliance:

• SOC 2 — cost allocation data informs chargeback and internal financial controls
• GDPR — allocation labels may carry tenant or user identifiers

Security: Allocation APIs disclose workload-level spend, label values, and capacity posture; require authentication and consider scoping by namespace or RBAC role.

Tools

• OpenCost — Cost allocation engine (Apache-2.0)
• Kubecost — Commercial OpenCost distribution
• Prometheus — Metrics backend (Apache-2.0)
• Grafana — Dashboards for OpenCost (AGPL-3.0)
• Thanos — Long-term metrics storage (Apache-2.0)
• kubectl cost — CLI client (Apache-2.0)

Suggested Metrics

• allocation_query_latency_p95_ms — 95th-percentile latency of /allocation requests.
• allocation_rows_returned — Number of aggregated allocation rows in a response.
• idle_cost_share — Fraction of total cost attributed to idle resources in the window.
• shared_cost_share — Fraction of total cost distributed via shared-cost rules.
• cluster_cost_total — Total cluster cost over the queried window.

Example Implementations

• OpenCost — Reference implementation of the OpenCost Allocation API.
• Kubecost — Commercial distribution that implements the OpenCost API.

Related Properties

• Opencost specification
• Focus billing export
• Focus conformance report
• Finops framework
• Pricing

Tags

• OpenCost
• FinOps
• Kubernetes
• Cost Allocation
• API

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