The Hardest Parts of Kubernetes Cost Monitoring — Explained Simply

Three things derail most cost projects:

• Shared services: ingress, mesh, logging; allocate by traffic or pod count, not guesses.
• Egress: cross-AZ and internet transfer; tag it per namespace and alert on spikes.
• Labels: without owner/team labels, allocation collapses; enforce via admission.
• Spot/on-demand mix: interruptions and fallback capacity change cost; track spot availability and buffer explicitly.
• Load balancer/NAT costs: fixed infra charges per tenant can dominate small clusters if you don’t share or prune them.

Handle these well and the rest—nodes, storage, control plane—is straightforward.***