The Cluster Tax
K8s management plane: 5-10% overhead. Over-provisioned pods: 10-15% waste. Persistent storage sprawl: 3-5%. Control plane costs: 2-3%. Total "cluster tax": 20-30% on top of raw compute.
Optimization strategies: implement resource requests and limits, use Vertical Pod Autoscaler, right-size node pools, implement pod disruption budgets for spot nodes, clean up unused namespaces.