Cut Your Kubernetes Costs by 30-50%
in Under 45 Days

The Challenge

A web intelligence company running 7,000+ pods on Amazon EKS was facing rapidly escalating compute costs. Their Cluster Autoscaler was over-provisioning nodes, and their primary webscraping application—the core revenue driver—was requesting far more CPU and memory than it actually needed.

The Approach

I executed a two-pronged optimization strategy focused on the infrastructure layer—no application code changes required:

• Karpenter Migration: Replaced Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter, enabling smarter bin-packing and access to a diverse pool of instance types. Karpenter's just-in-time provisioning eliminated CA's excess reserve capacity.
• Pod Right-Sizing: Used Grafana dashboards to analyze actual resource utilization. Identified that the primary webscraping application was requesting 3-4x more resources than peak usage. Tuned resource requests and limits to match real-world consumption.
• Instance Diversification: Configured Karpenter NodePools to select from 20+ instance types, letting AWS choose the most cost-effective option for each workload's actual requirements.

The Implementation

Changes were rolled out incrementally over several weeks with zero downtime. Grafana dashboards provided real-time visibility into the cost reduction as optimizations took effect.