59 articles on kubernetes — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
EKS, AKS, and GKE all charge for the worker nodes; the difference is the control-plane fee (EKS and GKE charge per cluster-hour, AKS's standard tier is free) and autopilot-style options. This compares them and where the real cost lives.
A Kubernetes cluster bill is one number; the hard part is attributing it to namespaces, teams, and workloads. This is how cost monitoring works, what it needs (requests, labels, allocation), and how it complements pre-deploy estimation.
Requests, not usage, decide how many nodes you pay for, the scheduler packs pods by requests. Set them too high and you buy idle nodes; too low and you risk throttling and OOM kills. Here is how to size them for cost and stability.
The cloud bills nodes; teams consume pods. Here's how to allocate cluster cost by requests or usage, handle shared and idle costs, and where OpenCost/Kubecost and pre-deploy estimation each fit.
Autopilot bills pod resource requests (~$0.0445/vCPU-hour), not nodes, so oversized requests are the overspend. Here's how to right-size requests, use Spot Pods, and pick compute classes.
EKS cost is control plane ($73/mo) + worker nodes (the bulk) + EBS + load balancers + NAT + cross-AZ transfer. Here's the full breakdown and where the real savings are, almost all in the nodes.
Container Apps bills per resource-second and scales to zero; AKS bills node VMs 24/7 and gives full Kubernetes. Here's the crossover and when each is the cheaper, simpler choice.
The AKS control plane is free (or ~$73/month for the SLA tier), but worker node VMs are the real bill. Here's how to cut AKS cost with the autoscaler, Spot node pools, right-sizing, reservations, and scale-to-zero.
Cloud Run bills per request-second and scales to zero; GKE bills for nodes 24/7. The cheaper option comes down to utilization. Here's the crossover, the min-instances trap, and where Autopilot fits.
Autopilot bills per-pod (vCPU, memory, ephemeral storage). Standard bills per-node. The break-even is around 50-55% node utilization. Here's the actual pricing math with n2-standard-4 nodes, when each mode wins, and how to migrate without surprises.
The honest cost comparison between EKS and ECS, including control plane fees, Fargate vs EC2 trade-offs, and when each platform makes financial sense. With concrete numbers from a 10-service production fleet.