Skip to content

Container Cost

Container Cost in OCTO is a specialized feature that provides deep, granular visibility into the costs of containerized workloads running in Amazon ECS and EKS. It helps teams accurately track, analyze, and optimize container resource usage and associated cloud spend — which are often hidden within broader infrastructure costs.

Built on AWS Split Cost Allocation Data (SCAD), this feature brings transparent, workload-level attribution to your container infrastructure costs, allowing you to understand what you're spending, where, and why.

Note: Container Cost supports AWS only, with plans to support other cloud platforms in the future.

What is Container Cost?

In traditional cloud billing models, container costs are difficult to isolate because containers share compute and memory resources. Container Cost solves this problem by utilizing AWS SCAD to break down shared infrastructure costs and attribute them to individual containers, tasks, pods, or services.

With Container Cost, you can:

  • Track costs at the task, pod, and workload level
  • Attribute EC2 and Fargate costs based on actual usage or resource requests
  • Analyze container spend using granular filters
  • Empower engineering and finance teams with accurate visibility and accountability

Currently supported services:

  • Amazon ECS (EC2 and Fargate)
  • Amazon EKS

Enabling Split Cost Allocation Data (SCAD) in AWS

To use Container Cost, Split Cost Allocation Data (SCAD) must be enabled in your AWS Billing settings. SCAD is what allows container-level cost attribution in CUR (Cost and Usage Report) data. SCAD data is not available through AWS Cost Explorer. It is only accessible via Cost and Usage Reports (CUR or CUR 2.0 with Data Exports).

Step 1: Opt in to SCAD

  1. Go to AWS Billing and Cost Management Console using a payer account. Only payer accounts can enable SCAD. Linked/member accounts can view data but cannot manage these settings.

  2. In the left navigation, select Cost Management preferences

  3. Under Split cost allocation data, select the services to enable (Amazon ECS and/or Amazon EKS): Split Cost Allocation Data Settings

  4. If enabling for EKS, choose one of the following cost allocation methods:

    • Resource requests
      Allocates EC2 costs based on CPU and memory requests per pod.
      Recommended as a baseline to get started.

    • Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
      Allocates EC2 costs based on the higher of resource requests or actual utilization.
      Requires additional setup.

    • Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights
      Offers deeper visibility into shared EC2 costs for EKS clusters.

    You may choose Resource requests at the very least to enable basic container-level cost tracking.

Step 2: Configure Your Cost and Usage Report (CUR)

  1. In the AWS Billing Console, under Legacy Pages, open Cost and Usage Reports

    Legacy Pages - Cost and Usage Reports

  2. Create a new report or edit an existing one

  3. On the Specify report details page:

    • Enable Split cost allocation data Split Cost Allocation Data Option in CUR
    • Ensure your CUR includes:
      • Resource IDs
      • Hourly granularity
Note: SCAD data may take up to 24 hours to begin appearing in your Cost and Usage Report (CUR).

Creating a Container Cost Group

After enabling SCAD and allowing time for the data to populate in your Cost and Usage Report (CUR), you can now create a Container Cost Group in OCTO to visualize your container cost and usage.

  1. Navigate to Cost Group Manager in OCTO and click Create Cost Group Step 1: Create Container Cost Group
  2. Choose the Container Cost option Step 2: Select Container Cost Option
  3. Select supported services (ECS and/or EKS) to include in your cost group Step 3: Select Supported Services (ECS/EKS)
  4. Fill out the basic details, then continue through the remaining setup steps

  5. Click Confirm and create to finalize the container cost group Step 5: Create

  6. Once created, your cost group will appear in the list with a dedicated Insights tab, where you can explore container-level cost and usage across multiple dimensions. Step 6: Container Cost Group Overview

What You’ll See

When viewing a Container Cost group, you’ll access a dedicated Insights tab that displays container-level cost and usage data. Container Cost Group - Main View

For ECS workloads, you can group costs and usage by:

  • Cluster
  • Service
  • Task
  • EC2 Instance
  • Tagged

ECS Cost ECS Usage

For EKS workloads, you can group costs and usage by:

  • Cluster
  • Namespace
  • Deployment
  • Workload name
  • Workload type
  • Node
  • Pod
  • EC2 Instance
  • Tagged

EKS Cost EKS Usage