Kubernetes Cost Management: The Definitive Guide

It’s no wonder that Kubernetes (k8s) has become an integral part of infrastructure for many enterprises. Kubernetes boasts powerful automation, scalability, and reliability that modern infrastructure demands, in addition to solving the complex challenges of managing containerized workloads at scale. While Kubernetes has vast potential and many benefits, but comes at a great cost without proper cost management.

Kubernetes has a steep price, and there is typically no real insight into costs. Cloud providers usually don’t point out which microservice, deployment, or application is responsible for high costs. Standard cloud billing tools lack such granularity, only providing surface-level visibility. In turn, creating pointless guessing games on which service is burning the budget. It’s time to stop the guessing games on how to lower that bill and start getting real answers and solutions on how to harness Kubernetes’ full potential without the high price tag. Control your Kubernetes costs by utilizing Kubernetes Cost Management.

This definitive guide aims to explore Kubernetes Cost Management, providing best practices, an overview of leading software solutions, and information on how Mirantis can help enterprises regain control over their spending costs. 

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• What Components Impact Enterprise Kubernetes Costs

• Most Effective Ways to Manage Kubernetes Costs

• Best Practices for Kubernetes Cost Optimization

• Why Mirantis May Provide the Best Kubernetes Cost Management Solution for Enterprise

What is Kubernetes Cost Management?

Kubernetes Cost Management is the practice of monitoring, analyzing, allocating, and optimizing the expenses incurred when running containerized applications on Kubernetes clusters. By using Kubernetes Cost Management strategies, enterprises gain:

• Granular Financial Visibility: Break down cloud costs by team, project, or application, to better understand what is driving costs.

• Operational Efficiency: Identify underutilized pods or over-allocated resources to make educated decisions on how to efficiently size your workloads for better scaling and reduce resource waste.

• Business Strategic Benefits: Compare costs across different providers and environments, enabling smarter placement of workloads. In turn, extracting more value from existing infrastructure by ensuring efficient usage before scaling up, maximizing ROI.

• Competitive Advantage: By freeing up the budget and gaining efficiency in operations, enterprises can invest more in product innovation.

How Kubernetes Cost Management Benefits You and Your Team

How Kubernetes Complicates Cost Tracking

Kubernetes is unique as it builds on a layered model that abstracts away any complexities, eliminating the need to manage raw infrastructure directly. Kubernetes prides itself on these abstraction layers; however, this becomes a nightmare for cost tracking.

These abstraction layers are what complicate cost tracking because infrastructure details are hidden behind constructs like pods, services, and namespaces. Typically, developers work with pods and namespaces, while cloud bills show charges for networking, servers, and storage. Kubernetes automatically moves workloads around and scales them up and down, which causes a disconnect between what the team can see and the cloud bill charges. If multiple teams were to share one cluster, this would further complicate who is responsible for what. But imagine if an enterprise were to have multiple teams work with one cluster…this would further complicate cost tracking, and the bill would only tick higher, without a clear reason why!

Why Enterprises Can’t Afford to Ignore Kubernetes Cost Management

When faced with increasing cloud bills and high demand, real-time visibility becomes essential. Costs don’t come from a single source, but are spread across all layers of infrastructure. Multiple teams, projects, and applications often run on the same cluster, drawing from the same pool of resources. Due to the lack of real-time visibility, it’s hard to figure out where costs originate, and enterprises are left guessing. Without clarity, optimizations are near impossible. How can enterprises lower their bill costs if teams don’t know which workloads are overprovisioned, or which services are consuming the most resources? Even worse, this can prevent accountability; finance can’t assign costs back to the right teams, and engineering can’t track the impact of their scaling and resource allocation choices. But by using real-time cost visibility, this can close the gap by connecting usage directly to costs, giving enterprises the insights they need to optimize infrastructure and promote shared responsibility for cloud efficiency.

So, why should enterprises invest in Kubernetes Cost Management?

• Financial Clarity Across Teams: Kubernetes cost management translates infrastructure resource usage into clear cost insights. Clear transparency into which teams, projects, or applications are driving cloud costs enables accurate budgeting for enterprises. No more surprises when the bill arrives!

• Optimization of Resources: Real-time visibility makes it easier to discover overprovisioned workloads, unused resources, and inefficient scaling. Enterprises can use this information to prevent waste, maximize ROI, and keep growth sustainable.

• Accountability and Ownership: By using Kubernetes Cost Management, Enterprises can assign costs back to teams or departments. Using a showback or chargeback model fosters accountability, making sure different departments are aligned around shared financial responsibility.

• Business Strategic Benefits: Effective cost management enables teams to innovate freely without the risk of overspending. Enterprises can scale their workloads with confidence, knowing their costs are monitored and controlled in real time.

There’s a saying that the devil is in the details, and with Kubernetes those details can be surprisingly expensive! Overlook a small component here or there, and you’ll be paying a massive price…literally.

Kubernetes Cost Explained: Five Key Components Every Enterprise Should Consider

What are the key components that drive the high costs on cloud bills? The numbers don’t come from nowhere, but rather, from behind the scenes. A few smaller components can actually drive up and stack charges and if enterprises don’t pay attention, these costs can get out of control fast. Here’s a few components that could be the culprit behind those expensive cloud bills:

Compute (Nodes and Pods)

Compute is a huge cost driver in Kubernetes. When you run an application in Kubernetes, this action requests CPU and memory. According to official documentation, the Kubernetes Scheduler checks available nodes for enough CPU, memory, and other requirements, then assigns the pod (which runs your application’s containers) to the most suitable node. Asking for more resources than needed wastes capacity and makes cloud bill costs higher.

• Overprovisioned nodes means unneeded resources are left idle and still cost money.

• Idle workloads will continue consuming allocated resources even when unused.

• Autoscaling misconfigurations can lead to unnecessary node creation.

Storage (Persistent Volumes)

Persistent storage backs databases, stateful apps, as well as logs. Storage costs in Kubernetes increase based on the amount of data provisioned and the performance tier selected. For example, larger volumes or faster SSDs cost more than smaller or standard options.

• Orphaned volumes remain active even after workloads are deleted.

• High performances classes (e.g., SSDs) sharply increase costs.

• Replication such as backups can multiply storage usage.

Networking (Traffic and Load Balancers)

Networking charges can stack up fast in Kubernetes environments. While services and ingress can make communication much easier, this also introduces hidden costs from load balancers, data transfers, and complex service meshes.

• Load balancers can incur hourly and data transfer charges can be expensive.

• Cross-region or cross-zone traffic can increase costs significantly.

• Service meshes can add unnecessary overhead in compute and networking.

Control Plane and Cluster Services

The Kubernetes control plane functions as the “brain” of the cluster, as it manages and orchestrates application workloads. To keep an important component such as a brain running without burden isn’t free, but there are several components attached that can drive up costs.

• Managed Control Planes can carry per-cluster fees, which can stack up fast.

• Monitoring and observability tools or add-ons can scale pricing by node count.

• Security add-ons can create licensing and compute costs.

Multi-Cluster Deployments

Running multiple clusters for isolation, compliance, or regional coverage can easily multiply costs. Every control plane, load balancer, and monitoring stack adds overhead, even if workloads aren’t fully utilizing the infrastructure.

• Duplicate CI/CD pipelines and tooling across clusters raise costs.

• Increased network charges for inter-cluster communication and data replication.

• DaemonSets running on every node can silently eat up resources, in turn driving up costs.

The Hidden Roadblocks to Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Keeping costs under control isn’t a steady, straightforward path. Hidden roadblocks hinder progress making it difficult to see where money is being invested or how to best optimize costs. Here are some common roadblocks encountered:

• Cost Attribution: Due to inherent lack of real-time visibility, it’s difficult to know which team or project is driving up the cloud bills. Resources are shared across clusters, leaving finance teams and engineering teams without clear accountability.

• Inconsistent Labeling: Without clear, consistent naming and labels, costs can’t be traced back to applications or teams. This in turn makes cost reports messy and difficult to use for cost optimization.

• Misconfigured Autoscaling: Even something as simple as misconfigured autoscaling can drive up costs. The smallest misconfiguration can create too many pods or nodes which lead to unneeded resources and higher bills.

• Limited DevOps-FinOps Integration: Developers are expected to build and ship quickly and finance trails behind, tracking costs after the fact. Without the proper tools to connect the two departments, cost control comes little too late to influence educated decision making.

With these challenges present, enterprises need a dedicated Kubernetes Cost Management Tool that can bring the proper visibility, accountability, and collaboration across teams. 

How Kubernetes Cost Management Delivers More than Just Savings: Top 5 Benefits

Without proper cost management, efficiency can slip through the cracks and bills can pile up fast. But with proper cost management, enterprises can gain so much more than just saved pennies. Here are the top five worthwhile benefits gained from proper Kubernetes Cost Management:

Better Use of Resources

By optimizing Kubernetes resources, clusters can run more efficiently, maximizing every dollar spent. Setting limits or boundaries on resource usage can cut costs efficiently. Enterprises can avoid idle machines, oversizing, and inefficient workloads that eat into budgets without adding any value.

• Right-sizing nodes and pods cut waste, lowering cloud bills while ensuring applications get exactly the resources needed to function.

• Bin-packing workloads maximizes efficiency, making the most of existing infrastructure before new resources are added.

• Cleaning up idle resources keeps clusters lean, freeing up budget for innovation instead of waste. In turn, reducing waste increases ROI.

Improved Forecasting and Budgeting 

No crystal ball needed – real time cost insights make cloud spending predictable. Finance and operations teams gain visibility into usage trends, which can enable educated decisions regarding budget and less surprises when the bill arrives.

• Historical data enables accurate forecasting allowing enterprises to plan budget with confidence for future growth and avoid unexpected expenses.

• Predictable spending patterns can keep budgets on track, ensuring financial stability.

• Clear cost attribution drives accountability allowing teams to see their impact on costs and optimize resources responsibly.

Faster Deployments and Go-to-Market Speed

By optimizing Kubernetes costs, enterprises no longer have to fear overspending. Without the burden of overspending, teams can ship faster and scale launches with confidence. Engineering moves quicker and go-to-market teams gain the agility to deliver products and campaigns on time without wasting money.

• Transparent cost data hastens engineering decisions, reducing delays and keeping development cycles on track.

• Built-in guardrails protect budgets during scaling, ensuring launches run smoothly without financial risk.

• Accelerated release times give marketing a competitive edge, helping products reach customers sooner and capture market share faster.

Enhanced Multi-Cloud Strategy

Kubernetes cost management strengthens multi-cloud strategies by revealing which environments deliver the best performance for the lowest cost; this helps enterprises place workloads where they’ll be most efficient and budget-friendly.

• Cross-cloud insights ensure workloads run in the most cost-efficient environment, lowering costs while maintaining performance.

• Flexibility to shift workloads prevents vendor lock-in, giving enterprises more control and freedom in cloud strategy.

• Benchmarking providers strengthens negotiation power, helping secure better pricing and long-term savings.

Reduced Operational Overhead

Kubernetes cost management tools automate the tedious process of reporting, which saves engineers and finance teams time and money. Instead of chasing down usage data in spreadsheets, cost management tools provide clear dashboards and real-time insights, freeing up time to focus on higher-value tasks.

• Automation reduces overhead, effectively lowering the cost of financial reporting and operational tracking.

• Real-time dashboards improve decision-making, enabling leaders to align cloud spend with strategic priorities.

• Streamlined reporting increases productivity, allowing teams to redirect time and budget toward growth initiatives and customer value.

Knowing the benefits is only half the battle—the real challenge is learning how to manage Kubernetes costs effectively so you can actually realize those benefits.

What's the Most Effective Way to Manage Kubernetes Costs?

Acknowledging the importance of Kubernetes Cost Management is the first step, but carrying it out effectively can be quite the challenge. The good news? Enterprises don’t need a complicated playbook to manage Kubernetes costs effectively. Here are a few proven Kubernetes cost strategies that enterprises can utilize to best rein in overspending, boost efficiency, and save time. 

Leveraging Automation for Efficiency

Automation eliminates manual effort and reduces the risk of human error in cost management. By automating scaling, cleanup, and reporting, enterprises can optimize their Kubernetes workloads continuously without slowing innovation.

• Save time by reducing manual reporting.

• Cut down on waste with automatic resource clean up.

• Drive consistency by enforcing efficiency at scale.

Policy-Based Governance

Policies can function as guardrails that ensure Kubernetes workloads run within budget and compliance boundaries. With proper governance in place, teams can innovate quickly without creating any financial risks. Thus, creating agility without sacrificing cost control.

• Protect budgets by enforcing hard resource limits.

• Support compliance with consistent cost rules.

• Enables growth by giving teams freedom to experiment while staying within financial guardrails.

Align Capacity with Demand

A common mistake enterprises make is giving Kubernetes clusters enough resources to handle the busiest times of day or year (peak demand). The problem is, most of the time, workloads don’t actually need that much power. A better solution would be to scale resources up when demand is high and down when it’s low. Resulting in applications running smoothly without wasting money on unused servers or storage.

• Reduces wasted capacity during off-peak times.

• Ensures performance while avoiding overspend.

• Supports flexibility by adapting to workload patterns.

Consolidate Clusters Wherever Possible

Running too many clusters means multiple control planes and tool costs. By consolidating multiple workloads into fewer clusters, enterprises can cut costs and reduce operational overhead.

•  Cuts fixed costs tied to each control plane.

• Simplifies management and reduces cluster sprawl.

• Improves utilization with a shared infrastructure.

Manage Resource Lifecycles

Idle or forgotten resources, such as old namespaces, unused services, or dangling load balancers, can quietly add to bills. Regular lifecycle audits ensure only active resources consume budget.

• Eliminates hidden costs from orphaned infrastructure.

• Keeps clusters clean and easier to manage.

• Improves efficiency with ongoing cleanup.

These strategies give enterprises a strong foundation for controlling Kubernetes costs. But strategies alone are nary enough; execution requires the right support. That’s where specialized software comes in. Let’s break down the best tools for Kubernetes cost management.

The Best Software for Managing Kubernetes Costs: A Breakdown

Having a good strategy can be effective, but having the right Kubernetes cost management software can amplify potential benefits. The secret to Kubernetes cost management isn’t just an effective strategy, but the right tools/software behind it. So, which tools are available can actually help cut costs and drive efficiency? Here’s the rundown.

Best Software for Managing Kubernetes Costs

Your Choices Matter: Why the Right Tool Makes the Biggest Difference

Each solution has its strengths, but also potential drawbacks. While open-source or niche tools may offer quick wins, they can fall short on pressing enterprise needs such as governance, compliance, and cross-team collaboration. Platforms such as Mirantis stand out by combining cost optimization with full lifecycle Kubernetes management, making it easier to balance savings with long-term scalability and control.

What's the Best Kubernetes Cost Management Tool for Your Organization?

Picking the right Kubernetes cost management tool isn’t about fancy bells and whistles, but rather about finding the best fit for enterprises’ scale, workflows, and financial goals. Here are a few questions to ask to help make a decision on which tool best suits an enterprise’s needs.

1. What Outcomes Matter Most to the Business?: Start by aligning on what matters most for the business. Lowering costs? More accurate budget forecasting? Set clear goals to help narrow the playing field and avoid the allure of fancy features that probably won’t help fulfill goals.

2. What Level of Cost Transparency Do You Require?: Consider how granular cost-visibility needs to be to meet goals. Perhaps an enterprise would only need cluster-level insights, while another would need full cost attribution down to teams, projects, and workloads?

3. What Governance and Compliance Features Should You Look For in a Cost Tool?: Ensure the tool supports policies, quotas, and audit-ready reporting. Strong governance prevents overspending and keeps usage aligned with enterprise standards.

4. How Well Does the Tool Integrate with Existing Workflows?: Make sure the tool fits seamlessly into an enterprise’s workflow. This includes existing DevOps, CI/CD, and financial workflows. Friction in adoption often limits impact.

5. Can the Tool Handle Both Scalability and Flexibility Requirements?: It is imperative that a tool can scale with workloads and adapt to multi-cloud or hybrid environments. Thus, solidifies long-term value, reducing the need for constant short-term fixes.

Best Practices for Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Running Kubernetes without proper cost control is like driving without a windshield; you don’t know what you’re doing or if you’re getting any closer to your destination. These best practices can help give clarity and real-time visibility, so enterprises can regain control and make objectives attainable

Right-Size Resources Continuously

Overallocated pods and nodes drive up unnecessary costs. Continuous review of resources (CPU, memory, or storage requests) ensures workloads get what they require and nothing more. 

• Cuts wasteful spending by avoiding oversized workloads. This can be carried out with autoscaling guardrails. Official Kubernetes documentation provides a walkthrough on how to carry this out.

• Improves performance stability through balanced allocation of resources.

• Maximizes efficiency across the cluster.

Standardize Labeling and Tagging

Consistent labeling and tagging connect costs to projects, applications, and teams. Creating visibility that makes it easier for accountability and makes financial reporting accurate and actionable.

• Clarifies ownership of spending.

• Simplifies reporting for finance teams.

• Drives accountability across business units.

Optimize Storage Practices

Unused or over-provisioned storage can quietly drive up costs. Regular reviews of volumes, retention policies, and data classes keep storage spend aligned with business priorities.

• Lowers costs by eliminating orphaned storage.

• Matches spend to value with the appropriate storage tiers. This can be set or changed to a default StorageClass, so PVs without a class use the intended tier.

• Improves efficiency through smarter retention.

Optimize Container Images

Smaller, purpose-built images pull faster, consume less storage, and reduce bandwidth. Prune dependencies, multi-stage build, and remove debug artifacts to keep images lean and save on costs.

• Accelerates deployments and rollbacks.

• Lowers storage and transfer spend.

• Improves security posture with reduced attack surface.

Standardize Defaults for Efficiency

Set cost-aware defaults so every new workload starts efficiently without any extra effort. By defining baseline values once per environment/tier, convert them into templates and require explicit justification to exceed. This turns cost control from case-by-case debates into predictable, low-friction operations.

• Drives savings at scale through consistency.

• Reduces rework and policy exceptions.

• Improves predictability for budgeting.

Tune Observability for Value

Right-size log retention, metric granularity, and tracing sampling to what the business actually uses.

• Reduces data costs without losing insight.

• Speeds investigations with clearer signals.

• Aligns telemetry spend to risk and impact.

Plan Cost-Aware Release Cadence

Batch any low-risk changes or edits, schedule heavy tests during off-peak, and align rollouts with capacity windows. Effectively treating release timing as a cost lever.

• Smooths demand spikes that trigger extra nodes.

• Lowers risk and rollback expense.

• Improves predictability for capacity planning.

Why Mirantis Stands Out Among Top Kubernetes Cost Management Solutions

When it comes to Kubernetes Cost Management, Mirantis certainly stands out with k0rdent. k0rdent is platform optimal for Kubernetes Cost Management, boasting an integrated FinOps module, multi-cluster management capabilities, and an automated, policy-driven approach. 

• Integrated FinOps Module: k0rdent comes with a dedicated module called k0rdent Observability & FinOps (KOF). This module offers a unified view of resource usage and cost across potentially thousands of clusters and infrastructure providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, on-prem)

• Automated, Template-Driven Optimization: k0rdent uses a declarative, template-driven model to enforce cost-saving policies. For example, templates can be defined with built-in financial guardrails such as budget limits and resource quotas. Repeated use of these templates can create the standardization of Kubernetes Cost Management best practices.

• Multi-Cluster Cost Management: k0rdent addresses the problem of the complexity of multi-cluster management by allowing enterprises to operate, automate, and visualize multiple clusters from the API of a single k0rdent management cluster. Thus, granting a singular point of control that oversees cluster fleets.

By uniting cost visibility with actionable control, Mirantis bridges the gap between every team, whether that be executives, FinOps, platform engineers, or product owners, to align infrastructure decisions with business outcomes. With k0rdent, enterprises can finally understand and demystify Kubernetes costs and make educated decisions to actively optimize these costs. That way, enterprises can reap the benefits of Kubernetes for their infrastructure, without having to break the bank to do so!

Watch Effective Kubernetes Cost Management in Action: Book a Demo Today!

Mirantis boasts a broad platform that aims to lessen the headache that comes with Kubernetes Infrastructure, whether that’s cluster management or better insight into resource usage and cost. Mirantis has you covered.

Whether you’re:

• An executive seeking enterprise-wide cost visibility to shave down high cloud bills.

• In FinOps, looking for a way to control budgets with precise allocation and more accurate forecasting

• A platform engineer aiming to optimize workloads and cut down on resource waste

• A product manager looking to gain better clarity to prioritize smarter, allocate resources where they deliver the most value, and confidently justify roadmap decisions with data-driven cost insights.

Mirantis utilizes Kubernetes Cost Management Best Practices through its platform to make attaining goals that much easier. See why Mirantis is one of the top choices for enterprise Kubernetes Cost Management: book a demo today!