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Cloud Economics9 min read

Kubernetes Cost Management: The Cluster Tax Nobody Talks About

Kubernetes adds 20-30% infrastructure cost overhead. Here's how to manage it.

By Richard Ewing·

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.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.