Cutting our EKS bill by 60% without touching autoscaling
Claude walked through the node group sizing, spot mix and the two Terraform changes that actually moved the number.
Our EKS bill jumped from $4.2k to $11k/month after we moved three services over. Autoscaling is on. Where do I even start looking?
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