Cloud FinOps & Infrastructure Engineering
Kubernetes Cost Optimization. The 2026 Technical Checklist.
Over-provisioning is the primary cause of cloud waste. Industry telemetry shows production Kubernetes clusters average below 30% compute utilization. Use this field-tested checklist to eliminate overspend across EKS, AKS, and GKE.
01
Right-Sizing Pod Requests & Limits
Implement VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaler):Deploy VPA in Recommender mode across test and staging environments to identify the delta between requested and actual CPU/memory allocations.
Eliminate Unnecessary 'Guaranteed' QoS:Avoid setting limits equal to requests on non-critical background jobs; allow the Kubernetes scheduler to overcommit idle cluster headroom safely.
Automate Metric-Driven HPA:Scale pods based on actual ingress throughput or queue latency (KEDA) rather than noisy CPU utilization spikes.
02
Dynamic Node Provisioning with Karpenter
Replace Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter:Migrate to intent-driven node provisioning that directly selects the cheapest EC2/Compute Engine instance types matching pod spec requirements in sub-40 seconds.
Spot Instance Diversification:Route stateless, interruptible jobs to Spot fleets across at least 15 instance types with graceful preemption handlers to prevent workload thrashing.
Node Consolidation Policy:Enable Karpenter WhenEmpty and WhenUnderutilized consolidation algorithms to continuously drain underpopulated worker nodes.
03
Network & Persistent Storage FinOps
Mitigate Cross-AZ Data Egress:Co-locate chatty microservices within the same Availability Zone using Pod Topology Spread Constraints to eliminate multi-AZ transfer penalties.
EBS Volume GP3 Modernization:Migrate all legacy gp2 volumes to gp3 across persistent volume claims for an instant 20% baseline storage cost reduction with decoupled IOPS.
Automated Snapshot Retention Policies:Prune orphaned persistent volume claims and old CSI snapshots automatically with lifecycle governance controllers.
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