Kubernetes Cost Optimization
Moving beyond cluster flat fees. Analyzing actual pod requests, daemonset overhead, Karpenter node provisioning, and GPU workload economics.
Pod Requests & Limits Rightsizing
The #1 driver of Kubernetes overprovisioning: reserving 4 vCPUs per pod when historical peak utilization rarely exceeds 0.5 vCPUs.
- Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) profiling
- Setting realistic request buffers based on P95 telemetry
- Preventing synthetic out-of-memory (OOM) evictions
Autoscaling: Karpenter vs Cluster Autoscaler
Traditional cluster autoscalers wait for node pressure before scaling. Karpenter directly matches pod demands with cost-optimal EC2 types.
- Just-in-time node provisioning with mixed instance types
- Automated node consolidation when workloads scale down
- Leveraging Spot instances for stateless microservices
AI & GPU Infrastructure Costs
GPU nodes (g5, p4, p5) represent immense capital expenditure. Preventing idle GPU reservation is critical for AI startup runways.
- Multi-instance GPU (MIG) slicing for model inference
- Aggressive scale-to-zero policies for training pipelines
- Detecting zombie notebooks and orphaned training jobs
DaemonSet & System Overhead
Observability agents, log collectors, and service mesh sidecars duplicated on small nodes eat up to 30% of cluster capacity.
- Auditing Datadog, Prometheus, and fluentd resource allocations
- Migrating from sidecar proxies to node-level or eBPF daemons
- Standardizing on larger worker node sizes to minimize system overhead
Namespace & Multi-Tenant Cost Allocation
Understanding which squad or customer workload is driving EKS bill inflation across shared multi-tenant clusters.
- OpenCost & Kubecost container-level cost tracking
- Attributing shared cluster overhead fairly across squads
- Establishing namespace resource quotas to prevent noisy neighbors
EKS Control Plane & Add-ons
Optimizing cluster counts, AWS VPC CNI IP allocations, and managed add-on licensing costs across staging and production.
- Consolidating low-density development clusters
- VPC CNI prefix delegation to maximize pods per node
- CoreDNS scaling and metrics scraping frequency
Need to audit your EKS cluster costs?
I analyze pod utilization, node packing, and Karpenter configs to eliminate container waste.
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