Workloads with consistently low CPU and memory usage may no longer serve active traffic or scheduled tasks, but continue reserving resources within the cluster. These idle deployments often remain after project migrations, feature deprecations, or experimentation. Removing inactive workloads allows node groups to scale down, reducing infrastructure costs without impacting active services.
EKS control planes are billed hourly, and compute resources (EC2 nodes or Fargate) are billed separately based on usage. Kubernetes workloads that reserve CPU and memory continue consuming node capacity, even if they are idle, driving unnecessary compute costs.
Delete workloads confirmed to be inactive to reclaim node capacity and reduce cluster size. Review associated Kubernetes resources such as Services, ConfigMaps, and Persistent Volume Claims to ensure complete cleanup. Incorporate tagging and lifecycle management practices to better track workload ownership and reduce future accumulation of unused resources.
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