EKS Cost Reduction Strategies

Kubernetes is designed to use resources efficiently, but uncontrolled growth on Amazon EKS can lead to serious costs. You can implement the following strategies step-by-step to optimize your EKS bill.

1. Using Spot Instances

The most effective way to reduce cost is to use Spot Instances for Worker Nodes. It provides up to 90% discount.

• How? Set your node groups as "Spot". EKS manages Spot instance interruptions with aws-node-termination-handler and safely moves pods to another node.

2. Right Sizing

Your pods' CPU and Memory requests are usually set higher than necessary. Kubernetes reserves space based on these requests, blocking that resource even if there is no usage.

• Solution: Install Kubecost or Goldilocks to see the actual usage of pods and update requests values accordingly.

3. Bin Packing with Karpenter

Default Cluster Autoscaler can sometimes work efficiently. Karpenter selects the smallest and cheapest instance type that exactly fits the needs of pending pods. It places pods on nodes like playing tetris in the most compact way (Bin Packing), reducing the number of empty nodes.

4. Off-Hours Downscaling

Do your Development (Dev) and Test environments need to run on weekends or at night?

• Solution: Reduce the replica count to 0 at certain hours (e.g., 20:00 - 08:00) with tools like Kube-downscaler. This gives you up to 60% savings.

5. Watch Network Costs (NAT Gateway)

If your pods access the internet via NAT Gateway, you pay a fee per processed data.

• Solution: Use VPC Endpoints to access AWS services like S3 and DynamoDB. This traffic is free and bypasses the NAT Gateway.

6. Storage Cleanup

"Unattached" EBS volumes (PV) left over from deleted pods can inflate the bill. Regularly scan for and delete idle disks.

Cost optimization is not a one-time job, it is a continuous culture (FinOps). If you want to get professional analysis support to reduce your EKS costs, you can benefit from our AWS Consultancy service.