A real-world case study of how we reduced a client's Kubernetes bill by 61% without sacrificing reliability or performance.

The Problem: Runaway Cloud Costs


A LogiChain approached us with a Kubernetes cluster costing $80,000/month. Engineers had provisioned generously during rapid growth but never revisited resource allocation.


The Audit


Week one was pure observation. We deployed Kubecost and found:


  • 40% of pods were requesting 3-5× more CPU than they used
  • Spot instance adoption was 0% (everything was on-demand)
  • 15 idle namespaces from decommissioned services still consuming resources
  • No cluster autoscaler — manually sized node groups

The Fixes


1. Right-sized all pods using VPA recommendations — saved $18K/month

2. Migrated stateless workloads to spot — saved $14K/month

3. Implemented cluster autoscaler — eliminated over-provisioned nodes

4. Deleted zombie resources — immediate $4K/month saving

5. Reserved instances for baseline load — 30% discount on committed spend


Result


Monthly spend: $80K → $31K. Same reliability. Better observability. ROI in month one.