The 7 Kubernetes Cost Drivers Most Teams Miss
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Cast AI's 2026 analysis of tens of thousands of production clusters reveals average CPU utilization at just 8% fleet-wide. Seven key cost drivers are identified: idle/underutilized nodes, over-requested pods (68% waste 3–8x more memory than consumed), untuned HPA/VPA/CA autoscaling, on-demand instances instead of spot (59–77% savings possible), hidden storage and egress costs from orphaned PVCs and cross-AZ traffic, managed control plane fees (EKS at $72/month per cluster), and idle GPUs averaging 5% utilization. Each driver includes detection commands, root cause analysis, and concrete fixes such as Karpenter consolidation, VPA Auto mode with p95+20% headroom, KEDA for event-driven scaling, Topology Aware Routing, and GPU time-slicing or MIG partitioning for A100/H100s.
