Opencost Specification

An OpenCostSpecification property references documentation describing how an API or platform's cost reporting conforms to the OpenCost Specification — a CNCF Incubating project that defines a vendor-neutral standard for measuring and allocating Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure costs. OpenCost covers cluster asset costs, workload cost allocation by namespace, deployment, pod, and label, and idle resource cost distribution. Linking an OpenCost conformance document makes Kubernetes cost data interoperable with FinOps tooling.

Also known as: OpenCost Spec, OpenCost Conformance, Kubernetes Cost Specification

Example

- type: OpenCostSpecification
  url: https://developers.example.com/costs/opencost

Standards

CNCF / OpenCost OpenCost Specification v0.1
CNCF (Incubating) OpenCost project
CNCF / OpenCost OpenCost documentation
CNCF / Kubernetes Kubernetes resource model
CNCF / Prometheus Prometheus exposition format
CNCF OpenMetrics
FinOps Foundation FOCUS — FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification

Media Types

application/json — Primary response format for OpenCost APIs.
text/plain — Prometheus metrics exposition for OpenCost-emitted series.

Governance Rules

asset-coverage (OpenCost Specification) — Implementations must enumerate the supported asset categories (Node, Disk, LoadBalancer, ClusterManagement, Network).
allocation-keys (OpenCost Specification) — Allocation must be reportable by namespace, controller, pod, container, service, and label.
idle-policy-declared (OpenCost Specification) — Treatment of idle and unallocated capacity must be documented.
shared-cost-policy (OpenCost Specification) — Shared-cost distribution policy (proportional, even, by-label) must be discoverable.
currency-iso4217 (OpenCost Specification) — Reported costs must be denominated in an ISO 4217 currency code.

Risk & Compliance

Compliance:

SOC 2 — cost reporting underpins internal chargeback and showback controls
GDPR — workload labels may inadvertently include personal data

Security: OpenCost surfaces detailed workload, label, and capacity data; restrict to operators and finance roles and avoid exposing label values that could leak tenancy.

Tools

OpenCost — Reference implementation (Apache-2.0)
Kubecost — Commercial OpenCost distribution
Prometheus — Metrics backend (Apache-2.0)
Grafana — Dashboards (AGPL-3.0)
CNCF Landscape — Ecosystem map
kubectl cost — CLI client (Apache-2.0)

Suggested Metrics

opencost_spec_version — Version of the OpenCost Specification a provider claims conformance to.
asset_categories_supported — Number of OpenCost asset categories the implementation reports.
allocation_keys_supported — Number of allocation aggregation keys supported.
focus_mapping_documented — Boolean — whether the implementation publishes an OpenCost-to-FOCUS column mapping.

Example Implementations

OpenCost — Reference implementation maintained by the OpenCost community under CNCF.
Kubecost — Commercial distribution conformant to the OpenCost Specification.

Related Properties

Opencost allocation api
Focus billing export
Focus conformance report
Focus contract commitments
Finops framework
Pricing