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Optimize costs in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

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Cost optimization is about maximizing the value of resources while minimizing unnecessary expenses within your cloud environment. This process involves identifying cost effective configuration options and implementing best practices to improve operational efficiency. An AKS environment can be optimized to minimize cost while taking into account performance and reliability requirements.

In this article, you learn about:

  • Strategic infrastructure selection
  • Dynamic rightsizing and autoscaling
  • Leveraging Azure discounts for substantial savings
  • Holistic monitoring and FinOps practices

Prepare the application environment

Evaluate SKU family

It's important to evaluate the resource requirements of your application prior to deployment. Small development workloads have different infrastructure needs than large production ready workloads. While a combination of CPU, memory, and networking capacity configurations heavily influences the cost effectiveness of a SKU, consider the following VM types:

  • Azure Spot Virtual Machines - Spot node pools are backed by Azure Spot Virtual machine scale sets and deployed to a single fault domain with no high availability or SLA guarantees. Spot VMs allow you to take advantage of unutilized Azure capacity with significant discounts (up to 90% as compared to pay-as-you-go prices). If Azure needs capacity back, the Azure infrastructure evicts the Spot nodes. Best for dev/test environments, workloads that can handle interruptions such as batch processing jobs, and workloads with flexible execution time.
  • Ampere Altra Arm-based processors (ARM64) - ARM64 VMs are power-efficient and cost effective but don't compromise on performance. With AMR64 node pool support in AKS, you can create ARM64 Ubuntu agent nodes and even mix Intel and ARM architecture nodes within a cluster. These ARM VMs are engineered to efficiently run dynamic, scalable workloads and can deliver up to 50% better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs for scale-out workloads. Best for web or application servers, open-source databases, cloud-native applications, gaming servers, and more.
  • GPU optimized SKUs - Depending on the nature of your workload, consider using compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, or even graphical processing unit (GPU) optimized VM SKUs. GPU VM sizes are specialized VMs that are available with single, multiple, and fractional GPUs. GPU-enabled Linux node pools on AKS are best for compute-intensive workloads like graphics rendering, large model training and inferencing.

Note

The cost of compute varies across regions. When picking a less expensive region to run workloads, be conscious of the potential impact of latency as well as data transfer costs. To learn more about VM SKUs and their characteristics, see Sizes for virtual machines in Azure.

Use cluster preset configurations

Picking the right VM SKU, regions, number of nodes, and other configuration options can be difficult upfront. Cluster preset configurations in the Azure portal offloads this initial challenge by providing recommended configurations for different application environments that are cost-conscious and performant. The Dev/Test preset is best for developing new workloads or testing existing workloads. The Production Economy preset is best for serving production traffic in a cost-conscious way if your workloads can tolerate interruptions. Noncritical features are off by default and the preset values can be modified at any time.

Consider multitenancy

AKS offer flexibility in how you run multitenant clusters and isolate resources. For friendly multitenancy, clusters and infrastructure can be shared across teams and business units through logical isolation. Kubernetes Namespaces form the logical isolation boundary for workloads and resources. Sharing infrastructure reduces cluster management overhead while also improving resource utilization and pod density within the cluster. To learn more about multitenancy on AKS and to determine if it's right for your organizational needs, see AKS considerations for multitenancy and Design clusters for multitenancy.

Warning

Kubernetes environments aren't entirely safe for hostile multitenancy. If any tenant on the shared infrastructure can't be trusted, additional planning is needed to prevent tenants from impacting the security of other services.

Consider physical isolation boundaries. In this model, teams or workloads are assigned to their own cluster. Added management and financial overhead will be a tradeoff.

Build cloud native applications

Make your container as lean as possible

A lean container refers to optimizing the size and resource footprint of the containerized application. Check that your base image is minimal and only contains the necessary dependencies. Remove any unnecessary libraries and packages. A smaller container image will accelerate deployment times and increase scaling operation efficiency. Going one step further, Artifact Streaming on AKS allows you to stream container images from Azure Container Registry (ACR). It pulls only the necessary layer for initial pod startup, reducing the pull time for larger images from minutes to seconds.

Enforce resource quotas

Resource quotas provide a way to reserve and limit resources across a development team or project. Quotas are defined on a namespace and can set on compute resources, storage resources, and object counts. When you define resource quotas, individual namespaces are prevented from consuming more resources than allocated. This is particularly important for multi-tenant clusters where teams are sharing infrastructure.

Use cluster start stop

Small development and test clusters, when left unattended, can realize large amounts of unnecessary spending. Turn off clusters that don't need to run at all times using cluster start and stop. Doing so shuts down all system and user node pools so you aren’t paying for extra compute. All objects and cluster state will be maintained when you start the cluster again.

Use capacity reservations

Capacity reservations allow you to reserve compute capacity in an Azure region or Availability Zone for any duration of time. Reserved capacity will be available for immediate use until the reservation is deleted. Associating an existing capacity reservation group to a node pool guarantees allocated capacity for your node pool and helps you avoid potential on-demand pricing spikes during periods of high compute demand.

Monitor your environment and spend

Increase visibility with Microsoft Cost Management

Microsoft Cost Management offers a broad set of capabilities to help with cloud budgeting, forecasting, and visibility for costs both inside and outside of the cluster. Proper visibility is essential for deciphering spending trends, identifying optimization opportunities, and increasing accountability amongst application developers and platform teams. Enable the AKS Cost Analysis add-on for granular cluster cost breakdown by Kubernetes constructs along with Azure Compute, Network, and Storage categories.

Azure Monitor

If you're ingesting metric data via Container insights, we recommended migrating to managed Prometheus metrics, which offers a significant cost reduction. You can disable Container insights metrics using the data collection rule (DCR) and deploy the managed Prometheus add-on, which supports configuration via Azure Resource Manager, Azure CLI, Azure portal, and Terraform.

If you rely on log ingestion, we also recommended using the Basic Logs API to reduce Log Analytics costs. To learn more, see Azure Monitor best practices and managing costs for Container insights.

Optimize workloads through autoscaling

Enable Application Autoscaling

Vertical Pod Autoscaling

Requests and limits that are significantly higher than actual usage can result in overprovisioned workloads and wasted resources. In contrast, requests and limits that are too low can result in throttling and workload issues due to lack of memory. Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) allows you to fine-tune CPU and memory resources required by your pods. VPA provides recommended values for CPU and memory requests and limits based on historical container usage, which you can set manually or update automatically. Best for applications with fluctuating resource demands.

Horizontal Pod Autoscaling

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) dynamically scales the number of pod replicas based on an observed metric such as CPU or memory utilization. During periods of high demand, HPA scales out, adding more pod replicas to distribute the workload. During periods of low demand, HPA scales in, reducing the number of replicas to conserve resources. Best for applications with predictable resource demands.

Warning

You shouldn't use the VPA in conjunction with the HPA on the same CPU or memory metrics. This combination can lead to conflicts, as both autoscalers attempt to respond to changes in demand using the same metrics. However, you can use the VPA for CPU or memory in conjunction with the HPA for custom metrics to prevent overlap and ensure that each autoscaler focuses on distinct aspects of workload scaling.

Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling

Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaler (KEDA) add-on provides additional flexibility to scale based on various event-driven metrics that align with your application behavior. For example, for a web application, KEDA can monitor incoming HTTP request traffic and adjust the number of pod replicas to ensure the application remains responsive. For processing jobs, KEDA can scale the application based on message queue length. Managed support is provided for all Azure Scalers.

Enable Infrastructure Autoscaling

Cluster Autoscaling

To keep up with application demand, Cluster Autoscaler watches for pods that can't be scheduled due to resource constraints and scales the number of nodes in the node pool accordingly. When nodes don't have running pods, Cluster Autoscaler will scale down the number of nodes. Note that Cluster Autoscaler profile settings apply to all autoscaler-enabled nodepools in the cluster. To learn more, see Cluster Autoscaler best practices and considerations.

Node Autoprovisioning

Complicated workloads may require several node pools with different VM size configurations to accommodate CPU and memory requirements. Accurately selecting and managing several node pool configurations adds complexity and operational overhead. Node Autoprovision (NAP) simplifies the SKU selection process and decides, based on pending pod resource requirements, the optimal VM configuration to run workloads in the most efficient and cost effective manner.

Note

Refer to Performance and scaling for small to medium workloads in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Performance and scaling best practices for large workloads in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for additional scaling best practices.

Save with Azure discounts

Azure Reservations

If your workload is predictable and exists for an extended period of time, consider purchasing an Azure Reservation to further reduce your resource costs. Azure Reservations operate on a one-year or three-year term, offering up to 72% discount as compared to pay-as-you-go prices for compute. Reservations automatically apply to matching resources. Best for workloads that are committed to running in the same SKUs and regions over an extended period of time.

Azure Savings Plan

If you have consistent spend but your use of disparate resources across SKUs and regions makes Azure Reservations infeasible, consider purchasing an Azure Savings Plan. Like Azure Reservations, Azure Savings Plans operate on a one-year or three-year term and automatically apply to any resources within benefit scope. You commit to spend a fixed hourly amount on compute resources irrespective of SKU or region. Best for workloads that utilize different resources and/or different datacenter regions.

Azure Hybrid Benefit

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) allows you to maximize your on-premises licenses at no additional cost. Use any qualifying on-premises licenses that also have an active Software Assurance (SA) or a qualifying subscription to get Windows VMs on Azure at a reduced cost.

Embrace FinOps to build a cost saving culture

Financial operations (FinOps) is a discipline that combines financial accountability with cloud management and optimization. It focuses on driving alignment between finance, operations, and engineering teams to understand and control cloud costs. The FinOps foundation has released several notable projects:

  • FinOps Framework - an operating model for how to practice and implement FinOps.
  • FOCUS Specification - a technical specification and open standard for cloud usage, cost, and billing data across all major cloud provider services.

Next steps

Cost optimization is an ongoing and iterative effort. Learn more by reviewing the following recommendations and architecture guidance: