How to Understand Your Kubernetes Costs Without Losing Your Mind

Cloud bills look chaotic until you bucket them correctly. Use this five-part model to explain any Kubernetes bill—EKS, GKE, or self-managed.

The five buckets

1. Control plane: EKS $0.10/hr per cluster or your own masters/ops time.
2. Nodes: on-demand vs spot mix; instance type and hours matter most.
3. Storage: GP3/SSD volumes, snapshots, and log/metrics retention.
4. Network: egress out of cloud, cross-AZ traffic, and load balancer LCUs.
5. Shared services: ingress, service mesh, logging, APM sidecars.

Map usage to dollars

• Label namespaces with owner/team. Allocate node cost by requested vCPU/GB-hour or p95 usage.
• Track egress per namespace; cross-AZ bytes often beat compute in cost.
• Attribute shared controllers by traffic or pod count so teams feel the impact.
• Include load balancers and NAT: idle LBs and NAT gateways quietly tax small clusters.
• Add buffer explicitly (e.g., 15–25%) instead of letting waste hide in “misc.”

Quick visibility checklist

• Cost per namespace/service weekly with waste percentage.
• Top egress talkers and cross-AZ offenders.
• PVs with zero reads/writes and over-sized requests.
• Spot vs on-demand share and interruption rate.
• Load balancer count and LCU usage per namespace.
• Control-plane count: consolidate if you run many tiny clusters.

Communicate simply

• “This cluster costs $X/day: $Y nodes, $Z traffic, $W storage.”
• Show the top 3 actions to reduce spend (rightsizing, egress reduction, retention).
• Pair each action with a dollar estimate and owner; close the loop in the next weekly review.

Clarity beats dashboards. When teams see these buckets, they know exactly where to optimize.***