Cloud computing costs: right-sizing, autoscaling, and other strategies to consider
Blog post from New Relic
The blog post explores several strategies for optimizing Kubernetes infrastructure to reduce cloud costs, emphasizing the importance of observability for identifying opportunities and conducting independent experiments. It highlights the use of New Relic’s observability platform to report cost information, allowing teams to make data-driven decisions for optimization. Key strategies include right-sizing resources to prevent over-provisioning, leveraging autoscaling techniques like Horizontal Pod Autoscaling and Cluster Autoscaler, and exploring Karpenter as an alternative for dynamic cluster resizing to improve bin packing efficiency. Additionally, the post discusses the cost benefits of using ARM processors over x86 for specific workloads due to their energy efficiency and the potential savings from utilizing Spot Instances for flexible and interruptible workloads. The author, Javier Mosquera, emphasizes that these techniques, though sometimes challenging, can lead to significant cost reductions while maintaining application performance and reliability.