GKE Cost Optimization Strategies with the Control Plane

Kubernetes’ built-in control plane gives you a powerful set of tools to orchestrate the placement of your workloads. However, out-of-the-box it doesn’t take zones, networks, and nodes into account when making its scheduling decisions.

This can lead to unnecessary costs for cross-zonal traffic, increased latency for inter-service communication, and suboptimal utilization of the underlying Compute VMs.

But there are strategies you can implement to avoid excessive costs.

We will go over how the control plane in GKE works under the hood, and how to use that knowledge to:

• Leverage Deployment configuration and smart scheduling strategies to optimize workloads
• Safely run workloads on Spot VMs
• Report on and set up guardrails around your GKE usage in the DoiT Console