Understanding Kubernetes Cost: A Practical Guide for Startups

Startup bills spike because no one owns the cluster line items. Here’s a simple checklist to keep spend sane while you move fast.

• Control plane: EKS $73/month per cluster—consolidate staging/preview where possible.
• Nodes: favor spot for stateless services; keep 1–2 on-demand nodes as buffer.
• Load balancers: prune idle LBs; use internal LBs for service-to-service traffic.
• Storage: right-size PVs; delete stale PVCs and snapshots; prefer GP3 defaults.
• Egress: cross-AZ and internet egress add up fast; co-locate chatty services and use private endpoints.
• Guardrails: enforce labels, requests/limits, and ResourceQuota on every namespace.
• Budgets: set a monthly budget per env; alert when burn rate >1.2x; freeze non-critical namespaces if needed.
• Retention: logs/metrics 7–14 days max; archive to S3 if you must keep longer.
• Preview hygiene: auto-delete preview namespaces on PR close; schedule nightly scale-downs.

Invest 60 minutes in these basics and you avoid the “why is our AWS bill doubled?” conversation.***