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AWS EKS & ECS Cost Visibility Without Third-Party Agents

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Prerequisites

• You have an AWS EKS or ECS cluster running.
• You have an AWS provider connected to Costory with your CUR data ingested.
• You have labels or tags applied (or plan to apply them) to your pod deployments.

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Output

• Granular cost visibility at the Kubernetes label level (team, app, environment, etc.) without any third-party agent.
• Ability to track waste ratio per node pool and identify over-provisioned clusters.
• Foundation for cost allocation and chargeback across teams.
• Stable cost data using Contracted Cost so Savings Plan reassignments between clusters do not create false cost spikes.

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Steps

1

Enable AWS container cost data for EKS / ECS

Since November 2025, AWS supports Split Cost Allocation for EKS and ECS. This exposes pod-level costs in your CUR, so you can get Kubernetes cost visibility without installing agents.Enable Split Cost Allocation data in your AWS account:

1. Go to the AWS Cost and Usage Report settings.
2. Follow the official AWS guide to enable Split Cost Allocation data for containers.
3. Make sure you activate the relevant Cost Allocation Tags in the Billing console.

2

Add labels to your pod deployments

To get meaningful cost breakdowns, ensure your Kubernetes workloads carry labels that reflect ownership and purpose. For example:

metadata:
  labels:
    app: my-service
    team: platform
    env: production

Common label strategies:

• team: Which team owns the workload.
• app / service: The application or microservice name.
• env: The environment (prod, staging, dev).

3

Wait for data to flow in

After enabling Split Cost Allocation and labeling your workloads, wait 2-3 days for the data to appear in your Cost and Usage Report and flow into Costory.

4

Compare native AWS vs Costory views (optional)

• Without Costory (AWS dashboard)
• With Costory (normalized labels)

Use the AWS Containers Cost Dashboard to get a basic breakdown by cluster and namespace.

Your labels might not have the same name across clusters or across services running inside and outside of EKS. Use Costory’s Feature Engineering to align them:This allows you to:

• Merge columns from multiple sources into a single label (for example k8s_label_env with env and environment).
• Rename values to standardize naming across providers (stg to staging, prod to production).

5

Explore your data in Costory

• Find waste by node pool. Use the Cost Explorer to group by node pool and spot clusters with unusually high waste.
  
  See the Kubernetes waste guide for a deeper dive.
• Calculate total cost of ownership per team. Roll up normalized labels to show costs by team, app, or environment and use the chart below as a baseline for chargeback conversations.\
• Identify over-requesting deployments. Filter or sort by high requested CPU to find workloads that are over-requesting CPUs and driving cluster waste.\
• Share a weekly Slack update. Turn any saved view into a Scheduled Report and send it to your team.\
• Surface cost changes in Digest. Add your Kubernetes labels to the Cost Breakdown Tree so Digest highlights what changed week over week.\

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Next steps

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FAQ