The Complete Guide to Reducing Kubernetes Costs on AWS EKS, Azure AKS and GCP GKE

Why Kubernetes Costs Are Often Hidden

Many teams underestimate Kubernetes costs because the charges are distributed across node instances, control plane fees, storage volumes, and load balancers. A "small" production cluster can cost $2,000-5,000/month before any application workload.

Control Plane Fees — Where Money Disappears

1. Use Spot/Preemptible Nodes for Stateless Workloads

AWS Spot nodes: up to 90% discount. Strategy: run 2-3 On-Demand nodes for stateful/critical workloads, fill remaining capacity with Spot. Kubernetes handles redistribution when Spot nodes are reclaimed. Typical saving: 40-60% of node costs.

2. Enable Cluster Autoscaler

Never pay for unused capacity. Cluster Autoscaler adds nodes when pods are unschedulable and removes nodes when utilisation drops below threshold. Combined with pod autoscaling, this can reduce node hours by 30-50%.

3. GKE Autopilot — Pay Per Pod

GKE Autopilot charges per pod resource request, not per node. For clusters with variable workloads running at 40% average utilisation, Autopilot saves 50-60% vs GKE Standard. Eliminates node management overhead entirely.

4. Use ARM Nodes

AWS Graviton3 (t4g, m7g, c7g) nodes offer up to 40% better price-performance for cloud-native workloads. Most containerised applications run without modification on ARM. EKS with Graviton3 m7g.xlarge: $0.1632/hr vs m7i.xlarge: $0.2016/hr — 19% saving per node.

5. Container Right-Sizing

Pod resource requests drive scheduling and billing (especially in Autopilot). Most containers over-request CPU and memory by 3-5x. Tools: Vertical Pod Autoscaler in recommendation mode, Goldilocks. Typical saving after right-sizing: 30-40% reduction in required node capacity.

6. OCI OKE — The Cost Leader

6 nodes × 4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM production cluster:

For new Kubernetes deployments, evaluate OCI OKE — the 67% cost saving vs AWS EKS is real and sustainable.