RealTheory uses rate cards to provide an accurate cost analysis for your Kubernetes environment.
A rate card defines the effective pricing for infrastructure components—either by referencing the cloud provider's pricing (for integrated providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP) or by using pricing that you specify manually.
This flexibility allows RealTheory to deliver accurate cost analysis across a wide range of environments and effective pricing plans.
Rate Cards in Integrated Cloud Environments
When RealTheory is integrated with a supported cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), cost analysis can be derived from provider pricing or from pricing that you provide.
In environments hosted by an integrated cloud provider, RealTheory applies an On-Demand rate card by default, ensuring that cost data is available immediately. While this provides a baseline view of costs, it most likely will not reflect your actual effective pricing if you use discounts, commitments, or negotiated rates.
To improve accuracy, you can assign alternative rate cards that better match your pricing model:
- Reserved pricing (1-year or 3-year commitments)
- Discount-based pricing
- SKU-based pricing (pricing derived from known resource SKUs)
- Custom pricing
Rate Cards in Non-Integrated Environments
For environments without native cost integration—such as currently unsupported cloud providers, private data centers, or bare metal servers, you must explicitly define pricing using:
- SKU rate cards, where you specify effective pricing for known resource SKUs (nodes, storage, networking, load balancers, etc.) using either explicit prices or percentage-based adjustments, or
- Custom rate cards, where you specify the cost for infrastructure components—such as compute nodes, storage, networking, load balancers, facility expenses, etc.
Example: RealTheory is not currently integrated with OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), but you can still provide accurate cost information by using the Oracle Cost Estimator (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html) to determine pricing and then configure a Custom rate card.
After you have configured and assigned a SKU or Custom rate card to your clusters, RealTheory uses these rate cards to calculate accurate cluster and workload costs.
Choosing the Correct Rate Card
By supporting several rate card types, RealTheory provides flexibility in how your near-real-time cost analysis is achieved. Each card is best suited to a particular scenario, and using the most appropriate rate card(s) will give you the most accurate cost analysis for your environment:
| Rate Card | Description | Example Applications |
|---|---|---|
| On-Demand (assigned by default) | Uses the on-demand public pricing plan for the appropriate integrated cloud provider | Use in environments that have cost integration with RealTheory when you have a pay-as-you-go pricing plan |
| Reserved 1 Year | Uses the pricing plan for Reserved Instances (RIs) or Committed Use Discount Instances (CUDs) with a 1 year commitment | Use in environments that have cost integration with RealTheory when you have a 1-year Reserved Instance or Committed Use Discount pricing plan |
| Reserved 3 Year | Uses the pricing plan for Reserved Instances (RIs) or Committed Use Discount Instances (CUDs) with a 3 year commitment | Use in environments that have cost integration with RealTheory when you have a 3-year Reserved Instance or Committed Use Discount pricing plan |
| SKU | Allows you to define effective pricing for individual components of the Kubernetes infrastructure using known resource SKUs, including nodes, storage, networking, load balancers, and Kubernetes management services | Use in integrated or non-integrated environments where infrastructure pricing can be mapped to known SKUs and adjusted to reflect negotiated, discounted, or non-standard rates |
| Discount | Allows you to apply a discount to components of the Kubernetes infrastructure such as nodes, storage, networking, and load balancers, etc. to best reflect your effective discount on the on-demand pricing plan for the appropriate integrated cloud provider | Use in environments that have cost integration with RealTheory when your effective pricing plan can be reflected in a single discount rate on pay-as-you-go pricing, or use when your effective pricing plan is best reflected in custom discount rates on pay-as-you-go pricing for components of the Kubernetes infrastructure |
| Custom | Allows you to specify pricing for individual components of the Kubernetes infrastructure as well as for shared resources such as building and hardware costs | Use in environments where infrastructure costs are shared, abstracted, or defined manually, including private data centers and unsupported cloud providers |
See Also
Setting the Default Rate Card
Creating a Discount Rate Card
Creating a SKU Rate Card
Creating a Custom Rate Card
Rate Card Policies Explained