Objectives
Implementing the strategies in this guide helps organizations achieve measurable improvements across cost, reliability, and operations:
Reduced infrastructure costs: Reduce compute spend by up to 30-60% through intelligent node provisioning, Spot and Graviton adoption, right-sizing pod requests, and eliminating extended support charges.
Improved resource utilization: Drive cluster utilization from the typical 20–30% up to 60–70% by eliminating idle capacity, consolidating underutilized nodes, and enforcing resource quotas.
Maintained application reliability: Balance cost savings with availability guarantees using Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs), topology spread constraints, graceful termination policies, and multi-AZ (Availability Zone) Spot diversification.
Operational efficiency: Reduce manual intervention through automated scaling, Karpenter-driven deprovisioning, off-hours scheduling, and workload placement policies that make cost-optimal decisions without human input.
Observability cost control: Prevent monitoring spend from scaling linearly with cluster growth by reducing metric cardinality, filtering at source, and disabling unnecessary insights in non-production environments.
