Pod Spec & Fleet
Rates are monthly per core and per GB, based on 2026 industry averages across the big three providers. Convert milliCPU with the milliCPU → cores converter.
A pod requesting 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB costs $17.50/month per replica — and at 30% utilization you are paying for 70% you never use. Model your fleet, then find the waste.
Rates are monthly per core and per GB, based on 2026 industry averages across the big three providers. Convert milliCPU with the milliCPU → cores converter.
| Provider | CPU / core | Memory / GB | Control Plane |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS EKS | $22 | $6.50 | $73/cluster |
| Google GKE | $21 | $7 | $73/cluster |
| Azure AKS | $20 | $7.50 | Free |
| Industry avg | $21 | $7 | ~$73 |
Kubernetes bills you for what pods request, not what they use. The node is paid whole, and the pod cost is its share of that node — which is why the two numbers that matter are the vCPU and memory requests in the pod spec. The formula is the same one OpenCost, Kubecost, and Harness use: (vCPU × per-core price) + (memory GB × per-GB price), scaled by replicas and the 730 hours in a month. A microservice requesting 0.5 vCPU and 2 GiB across three replicas lands at roughly $52.50/month before anything else.
Most pods use 20–40% of what they request. A fleet that requests $1,000/month of resources and runs at 30% utilization is doing about $300 of real work — the other $700 is idle allocation you are paying for. The fix is not more hardware; it is right-sizing: run kubectl top pods, compare actual usage to requests, and cut the over-provisioned limits. This is the single largest Kubernetes saving available, and it costs nothing but an afternoon. If you are also wondering how many pods actually fit on a node, the Pod Density briefing covers why the default 110-pod cap is a lie at production workloads.
Fault-tolerant workloads (batch, CI/CD, stateless APIs with replicas) can run on spot node pools at 70–80% discounts — add a pod disruption budget before you do. And remember the control plane: EKS and GKE charge roughly $73/month per cluster even if it runs one pod, so consolidating small clusters is often free money. For the wider Kubernetes cost picture, the container resource limit calculator and the Cloud Quotas toolbox cover adjacent sizing decisions.