cloud-services/services/cost/README.md

Cost Service

Per-vehicle cost estimation service for capacity planning and cloud vs on-prem comparison.

Overview

This service estimates the cost of running cloud services per VIN by:

1. Querying vehicle activity from ClickHouse (message counts)
2. Estimating resource usage based on activity level
3. Applying cost rates for cloud vs on-prem hosting
4. Storing aggregated cost data for reporting

Cost Estimation Methodology

Resource Estimates Per Active VIN

Activity Level	Messages/15min	CPU (cores)	Memory (GB)
Low	< 100	0.80	1.20
Medium	100-1000	1.20	1.80
High	> 1000	1.60	2.40

These estimates account for the full data pipeline per vehicle:

• Data ingestion (MQTT/HTTP endpoints)
• Kafka message processing
• Stream processing and transformations
• ClickHouse storage and queries
• Redis caching
• MongoDB document storage
• API serving

Base Infrastructure Costs

Shared infrastructure costs are distributed across active vehicles each collection interval:

Component	Cloud ($/15min)	On-Prem ($/15min)
Storage, Event Hubs, Defender, monitoring	$10.00	$0.90

Cost Rates (per hour)

Resource	Cloud (Azure)	On-Prem
CPU/core	$0.30	$0.02
Memory/GB	$0.08	$0.005

Cloud Rates (Fudged Higher)

• Based on Azure D-series VM pricing + 50% managed services overhead
• Includes: AKS compute, managed Kafka (Event Hubs), CosmosDB, Azure Storage, networking, monitoring
• Intentionally conservative (higher) to show true cloud TCO

On-Prem Rates (Fudged Lower)

• Based on 3-year hardware amortization only
• Assumes: owned hardware, minimal ops overhead
• Intentionally optimistic (lower) to show on-prem savings
• Does NOT include: datacenter costs, staff, power, cooling, network, maintenance

Savings Calculation

Per-VIN Cost = (CPU_cores × rate + Memory_GB × rate) × hours + (base_infra / active_vins)
Cloud Cost = Per-VIN costs summed across fleet
On-Prem Cost = Same formula with on-prem rates
Savings = Cloud Cost - On-Prem Cost
Savings % = (Savings / Cloud Cost) × 100

Expected savings: ~85-88% with on-prem hosting (hardware costs only).

Projected Annual Costs (5000 vehicles)

Based on ~$100k/month cloud spend:

Metric	Cloud	On-Prem
Monthly Cost	~$100,000	~$9,500
Annual Cost	~$1,200,000	~$114,000
Per Vehicle/Month	~$20.00	~$1.90
Annual Savings	~$1,086,000 (90%)	-

API Endpoints

GET /cost/vin/{vin}

Cost summary for a specific VIN.

GET /cost/fleet

Fleet-wide cost summary with top cost VINs.

GET /cost/summary?period=day|week|month

High-level cost summary for a time period.

GET /cost/comparison

Cloud vs on-prem cost comparison with projected annual savings.

GET /cost/report

Plain text report for terminal viewing.

Accessing the Report

The service is deployed internally on cec-prd-cluster-1 (no public ingress). To view the report:

# Quick one-liner
kubectl --context cec-prd-cluster-1 run curl-test --image=curlimages/curl --rm -it --restart=Never -- curl -s http://cost.default.svc.cluster.local:8077/cost/report

# Or port-forward and curl locally
kubectl --context cec-prd-cluster-1 port-forward svc/cost 8077:8077 &
curl http://localhost:8077/cost/report

Example Report Output

╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║                    COST SERVICE REPORT                           ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║  Period: 2026-01-01 to 2026-02-01
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║  FLEET OVERVIEW                                                  ║
║  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ║
║  Active Vehicles:     383                                         
║  Cloud Cost:          $51.66                                      
║  On-Prem Cost:        $4.74                                      
║  Savings:             $46.93 (90.8%)                             
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║  COST RATES                                                      ║
║  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ║
║  Cloud:   CPU $0.30/core-hr   Memory $0.080/GB-hr                 
║  On-Prem: CPU $0.02/core-hr   Memory $0.005/GB-hr                 
║  Base Infra: Cloud $10.00/15min   On-Prem $0.90/15min             
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║  ANNUAL PROJECTION (based on current usage)                      ║
║  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ║
║  Cloud Annual:        $619.97                                      
║  On-Prem Annual:      $56.86                                      
║  Annual Savings:      $563.11                                      
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

TOP COST VEHICLES:
VIN                       Cloud $    On-Prem $  Savings %
───────────────────    ──────────   ──────────   ────────
VCF1ZBU26PG004962            0.24         0.02      90.6%
VCF1EBU29PG008340            0.24         0.02      90.6%
VCF1ZBU23PG005471            0.24         0.02      90.6%
...

Note: Costs shown are from a short collection period. Numbers accumulate over time as the collector runs every 15 minutes.

Configuration

Env Var	Description	Default
CLICKHOUSE_HOST	Local CH for storing cost data	localhost
REMOTE_CLICKHOUSE_HOST	Dev cluster CH for VIN activity	-
COLLECTOR_INTERVAL_MINUTES	How often to collect metrics	15

Limitations

• Resource estimates are approximations, not actual measurements
• Cost rates are simplified and don't reflect all real-world factors
• On-prem costs exclude significant operational overhead
• Designed for business case illustration, not precise billing