Autoscaling being "on" usually isn't the problem — the problem is what it is *allowed to scale to*. Three things to check, in order of how often they're the culprit: **1. Node group instance sizing** If your node group is `m5.4xlarge` and your pods request 500m CPU, you are paying for a lot of empty node. ```bash kubectl get nodes -o custom-columns=\ NAME:.metadata.name,\ CPU:.status.allocatable.cpu,\ MEM:.status.allocatable.memory ``` **2. Requests vs. actual usage** ```bash kubectl top pods --all-namespaces --sort-by=cpu ``` Compare that against `resources.requests`. A 4x gap is common and i

Autoscaling being "on" usually isn't the problem — the problem is what it is *allowed to scale to*.