TCP# 66: Stop Overpaying and Prevent 2AM On-Calls
Practical container resource management strategies to optimize your Kubernetes resource allocation without sacrificing reliability
You can also read my newsletters from the Substack mobile app and be notified when a new issue is available.
Become a Founding Member
As a founding member, you will receive:
Everything included in paid subscriber benefits + exclusive toolkits and templates.
High-quality content from my 11+ years of industry experience, where I solve specific business problems in the real world using AWS Cloud. Learn from my actionable insights, strategies, and decision-making process.
Quarterly report on emerging trends, AWS updates, and cloud innovations with strategic insights.
Public recognition in the newsletter under the “Founding Member Spotlight” section.
Early access to deep dives, case studies, and special reports before they’re released to paid subscribers.
You've likely experienced this scenario: It's 2 AM, your phone rings with an alert, and despite having 70% idle cluster capacity, your production environment is down.
The culprit? Poorly configured container resource limits.
In this newsletter, we're diving deep into container resource optimization, how we reduced our cloud costs by 42% while eliminating those dreaded OOM kills entirely.
No more choosing between wasting money and dealing with middle-of-the-night emergencies.
Let's get into the actionable strategies.
The Hidden Cost of Resource Mismanagement
Most teams face a seemingly impossible choice:
Set limits too high: Waste thousands in cloud costs for resources you never use
Set limits too low: Face chaotic OOM killer intervention and those dreaded 3 AM pages
In our recent infrastructure audit across dozens of organizations, 78% of containers fell into one of these categories. The waste is staggering; 30-45% of cloud spend typically goes to idle or over-provisioned resources.
The problem isn't a lack of tooling; it's applying the wrong optimization strategy.
A 10-Step Optimization Framework
1. Capture the Right Metrics
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Cloud Playbook to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.