Every Cent Counts

Weaknesses

Koku shows some weaknesses in practice. The forecast function only supports rudimentary forecasts. The visualization tool also falls well short of expectations raised by the product description. Moreover, no warning mechanism is available to output alerts when certain thresholds are reached.

How Koku might be persuaded to interact with other enterprise solutions (e.g., enterprise resource planning, ERP, systems) is unclear. Although data transfer from the PostgreSQL database seems possible in principle, the amount of work this task would involve is huge.

In principle, central bundling of cost centers promises additional information, but this only makes sense if you use various service offerings and the cost situation is threatening to become unmanageable. In its current version, Project Koku provides only a rudimentary project-based breakdown of costs, in the style of ERP systems such as Odoo. This information is also essential for services to bill the provided services accurately.

Conclusions

More and more enterprises are realizing that cost management is required for cloud services, too. Although most cloud service providers offer their own solutions, the challenge is consolidating data if you use different services. Tools like Koku could fill this niche. In principle, the approach of combining cost data from different players is a good thing. Thus far, Koku occupies a special position among open source tools, but because of its dependence on Red Hat Insights, its scope of use is severely limited. In fact, the current version of Project Koku is only interesting for Red Hat users.