Table of Contents
Why Kubernetes Costs Escalate — A CEO's Perspective
Growth and speed are critical, but uncontrolled Kubernetes cost growth erodes margins and distracts leadership. Most teams discover the problem only when bills spike or quarterly forecasts miss targets—by then the fix is painful. Sahi Technologies helps CEOs regain control by turning Kubernetes into a predictable, optimized platform that scales efficiently with growth.
Rightsize Pods and Nodes (High-Impact First)
Start with data: collect 30 days of pod and node metrics to identify low-utilization workloads and steady-state consumers. Our clients typically find 20–40% of pods requesting more CPU/memory than they use. Rightsizing is a high-velocity win—small changes produce immediate monthly savings and reduce noisy autoscaling behavior.
🚨 Common Pitfall
- Downsizing without performance testing leads to incidents. Always combine rightsizing with targeted load tests and gradual rollout.
Smart Autoscaling: Balance Cost with Performance
Use a combination of HPA, VPA, and a tuned Cluster Autoscaler. Configure stabilization windows and sensible min/max boundaries to avoid oscillations and excess node churn. For predictable traffic, prefer scheduled scaling and reserve compute for baseline demand while using autoscaling for bursts.
Leverage Spot & Preemptible Instances Safely
Spot instances offer 60–80% cost savings for fault-tolerant workloads. Sahi's approach: classify workloads by criticality, apply mixed-node pools, and implement robust eviction/relaunch strategies so spot savings are realized without business risk.
Storage & Network Optimizations That Compound
Storage often becomes a silent leak. Archive old logs, right-size PersistentVolumes, and choose cost-tiered object storage with lifecycle policies. Minimize cross-region/AZ transfer for chatty services and cache hotspots closer to compute.
Governance: Policies, Quotas & Cost Ownership
Prevent future drift with namespace quotas, CI checks for resource requests, and team-level cost allocation. When each team owns its spend and receives dashboards, engineering decisions become economically informed.
Monitoring, Alerts & Runbooks
Integrate cost metrics into SRE dashboards and alert on anomalies (e.g., sudden node increases or sustained memory growth). Each alert should map to a runbook with automated remediations where possible—this reduces mean time to detect and mean time to repair.
Action Plan: 90-Day Kubernetes Cost Program
- Week 1–2: Baseline collection and identify top 10 spenders
- Week 3–6: Rightsize high-impact pods, adopt mixed node pools
- Month 2: Implement autoscaling policies, introduce spot for non-critical workloads
- Month 3: Governance, CI enforcement, and continuous cost monitoring
✅ Real Results
Typical outcome: 25–40% cost reduction within 90 days. For one SaaS client, Sahi reduced monthly Kubernetes spend by $18k while improving latency for peak traffic.
Ready to optimize Kubernetes costs without compromising performance? Sahi Technologies runs a structured 2-week health check on your clusters—identifying waste, recommending specific changes, and creating a phased implementation plan. Start a Kubernetes Audit →
