Installing ClusterCost on EKS, GKE, AKS — What’s the Difference?

ClusterCost installs the same way everywhere, but pricing inputs and RBAC differ by cloud.

EKS

• Provide on-demand + spot price sheet per instance family and AZ.
• Include cross-AZ rates and EBS GP3 defaults.
• RBAC needs read access to nodes, pods, and metrics; standard cluster role works.
• Watch NAT and LB costs; add them to the price sheet for accurate per-namespace allocation.

GKE

• Add Autopilot vs standard rates; map preemptible discounts.
• Watch for network egress between regions/Zones; include Cloud NAT if used.
• Permissions via Workload Identity or service account secret.

AKS

• Capture node pool rates and any savings plan commitments.
• Azure disk and load balancer pricing differ; include LRS/ZRS costs.
• Use managed identity for metrics and resource reads.
• Capture bandwidth/egress tiers; they change by region and affect multi-AZ traffic.

Command

npx clustercost@cli install --provider eks|gke|aks --price-sheet ./prices/<cloud>.yaml

Accurate price sheets are 90% of the job; the agent and CLI stay the same.***