Kubernetes Cost Optimization: A Practical Guide
Sarah Kim
Cloud Architect
The 45% Cost Reduction Playbook
Last quarter, we helped a client reduce their Kubernetes bill from $180k/month to $99k/month—without sacrificing performance or reliability.
1. Right-Size Your Pods
Most teams over-provision resources "just in case." This is the single biggest waste. Install metrics-server and VPA in recommendation mode, let it run for 2 weeks, and review recommendations.
We typically find CPU 40-60% over-provisioned and memory 30-50% over-provisioned.
2. Spot Instances for Stateless Workloads
AWS Spot instances are 60-90% cheaper than on-demand. Use them for web servers, worker pools, CI/CD runners, and dev/staging environments.
3. Autoscaling Done Right
Key insight: scale up fast, scale down slow. Most autoscaling configs scale too slowly (latency) or too aggressively (waste).
4. Reserved Capacity for Baseline
Your baseline load is predictable. Buy reserved capacity for 70% of your minimum load, use Spot for variable, on-demand as fallback only.
5. Namespace Resource Quotas
Prevent runaway costs with quotas. This saved a client $15k when a developer accidentally deployed 50 replicas of a memory-hungry service.
The 45% savings came from relentless attention to these fundamentals. No magic, just discipline.