OpenCost

OpenCost has helped a lot of people save a lot of money on their infrastructure. We like to think that this has contributed to things like engineering headcounts not getting reduced, small businesses and startups surviving longer, and so on. The OpenCost UI is a key part of this - it lets people visualize their spend, find inefficiencies, and so on. It's time to uplevel the OpenCost UI to enable the next generation of savings! Expected Outcome: We would like all pages of the OpenCost app to be implemented in Carbon or similar modern design system. We would like dashboarding functionality and a unified color scheme. All implementations should be delivered with unit and end-to-end tests. All existing functionality of the UI should be present in the revamped design.

OpenCost's data model is now 6 years old, and we have learned a great deal long the way. Based on these learnings, we would like to revamp how OpenCost represents its cost and usage data across the stack. We want to set OpenCost up for the next set of features and scale by building a solid foundation for the way we represent data. Expected Outcome: We would make the UID of Kubernetes objects into a first class citizen. These UID based objects would then be grouped in a similar hierarchy to the way Kubernetes itself is organized. A successful conclusion of this project would see an additional emitter implemented in OpenCost, that emits data objects stored in compressed protobuf which reflect a hierarchy of Kubernetes objects. The mentors will help establish this hierarchy. This hierarchy should then be tested via integration tests against the existing objects, and key metrics compared to be equal across those.

We would like OpenCost to more effectively integrate with AI agents. To do this, we need to implement a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to surface the information from the OpenCost API. This is a great opportunity to learn about MCP servers, and help us build an interface for AI agents to obtain reliable cost/usage information so that they can accomplish their business goals. Expected Outcome: We would like an MCP server integrated into OpenCost. This MCP server should support queries on allocations, assets, and cloud costs. The MCP server should support the full range of allocations, assets, and cloud cost query parameters. A demo video should be recorded showing an interaction with the MCP server, and used to obtain costing information in a conversational setting. In addition, integration tests must be created in the OpenCost Integration Tests repo that test all interactions with the MCP server.

We need enhanced integration tests to prepare OpenCost for graduation and enterprise readiness. This proposed project will deliver a comprehensive suite of integration tests designed to facilitate development and contribution by third parties, while protecting the stability of OpenCost for our tens of thousands of users. These tests will validate both the quality of the data collected by OpenCost, and the correct operation of the APIs. We have recently implemented a pipeline that builds real stacks for these tests to hit - we now need to fill that framework up with great tests. See the testing strategy document @ https://github.com/opencost/opencost/blob/develop/docs/testing/AUTOMATED_TESTING.md for the current state of testing, and the infrastructure that we have put into place to support this mentorship effort. Expected Outcome: 1) A comprehensive integration test suite as defined in the linked ticket. 2) All tests run and pass automatically in pre-existing per-push integration test pipeline. 3) Approach for each integration test is documented 4) Endpoint coverage % and parameter coverage % is calculated 5) Any unfinished or follow on work is documented via issues on OpenCost