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Cost modes

When to use Fully Loaded or Workload Only cost in Kubeadapt, and what each mode measures.

Kubeadapt reports cost in two modes: Fully Loaded (the default, which matches your cloud bill) and Workload Only (what your pods' requests cost, excluding idle capacity and cluster overhead). Both appear as chips in Cost Explorer and as ?cost_mode= values in the API.

The two modes at a glance

ModeIncludesReconciles toUI chip
Fully LoadedCapped CPU/RAM/GPU + idle redistribution + cluster overheadYour cloud billFully Loaded (default)
Workload OnlyCapped CPU/RAM/GPU onlyNode compute total (before idle)Workload Only

Fully Loaded

The default chip in Cost Explorer, and the number on KPI cards, the cluster dashboard and the organization dashboard.

What it includes:

  • The workload's own capped compute (CPU + RAM + GPU at the request line).
  • Idle redistribution — unclaimed node capacity, redistributed to the workloads that requested it.
  • Cluster overhead distribution — control-plane fees, system processes (kubelet, kube-proxy, daemons), and other non-attributable infrastructure cost, distributed across workloads.

What it reconciles to: your cloud bill. If you sum every workload's Fully Loaded cost across a cluster, you should land within a few percent of what AWS, GCP, or Azure charges for that cluster's compute over the same window.

Use it for:

  • Finance reports — anything that needs to tie back to the invoice.
  • Organization dashboards and cluster overviews.
  • Cost trends shown to non-engineering audiences.

Workload Only

The second chip in Cost Explorer. Strips out idle and overhead so each workload pays for exactly the compute it requested.

What it includes:

  • Capped CPU cost.
  • Capped RAM cost.
  • Capped GPU cost.

No idle redistribution. No overhead distribution. If a node is 60% packed, the 40% empty space doesn't get charged to anyone.

What it reconciles to: the sum of all workloads' Workload Only cost equals the node compute total before idle. It's smaller than the cloud bill by the idle + overhead share.

Use it for:

  • Per-workload optimization decisions. Idle and overhead distort fair comparisons between workloads.
  • Right-sizing reviews — you want to know what this workload costs in compute terms, not what its idle share looks like.
  • Cost-attribution math when you specifically need to exclude shared cluster cost.

Worked example

Take one workload running for one day on a node with $0.04/core/hr CPU and $0.005/GiB/hr RAM. The workload requests 1 core and 2 GiB and uses 0.6 cores and 1.6 GiB, so it is charged at its requests. Its share of the node's idle capacity is 30% of its compute cost, and its share of cluster overhead is 5%.

ComponentValue
CPU capped @ 1 core × $0.04 × 24h$0.96
RAM capped @ 2 GiB × $0.005 × 24h$0.24
Capped subtotal$1.20
Idle redistribution (this workload's share)$0.36
Overhead distribution (this workload's share)$0.06
Loaded total$1.62

Reported per mode:

ModeReported costWhy
Fully Loaded$1.62Capped + idle + overhead. Reconciles to the bill.
Workload Only$1.20Capped only. Cleanest for per-workload comparison.

When to use which

Question you're answeringMode
"Why is the bill up 18%?"Fully Loaded
"How much is namespace payments costing us?"Fully Loaded
"Which workload should I right-size first?"Workload Only
"Did this Helm change make the workload cheaper?"Workload Only
"How much idle do we have?"Fully Loaded total − Workload Only total

Fully Loaded is the default because most cost questions tie back to the invoice. Switch to Workload Only when you're optimizing a single workload and want idle and overhead left out.

See also

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