Cost & efficiency¶
119 talks across 27 events, oldest first: 24 case studies where an organization reports its own experience, plus concept talks and tutorials.
Keywords: cost, finops, cost optimization, efficiency, spot instances, resource management, rightsizing, sustainability (edit under categories: in wiki.yaml).
Over time¶
| Year | Talks | Case studies |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 4 | 3 |
| 2018 | 4 | 0 |
| 2019 | 8 | 3 |
| 2020 | 3 | 0 |
| 2021 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 6 | 0 |
| 2023 | 18 | 3 |
| 2024 | 30 | 5 |
| 2025 | 23 | 0 |
| 2026 | 21 | 9 |
Organizations with case studies¶
Spotify (2), Twitter, Comcast, What, Layer5, SolarWinds, Greg DeArment & Vlad Ungureanu's company, Multiple Clusters, Gitlab, Cast AI, Decathlon, Adobe, Skyscanner, Cortex, Machine, Chainguard
Talks by event¶
2016 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2016 (Seattle)¶
2017 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2017 (Berlin)¶
- case study · How We Built a Chargeback System for Twitter’s Compute Platform (Mesos/Aurora) — Twitter. Twitter describes how it built a chargeback system for its Mesos/Aurora compute platform.
- case study · Scaling Organizations Using Kubernetes [I] - Richard Fliam, Comcast VIPER — Comcast. Comcast VIPER shares lessons and mistakes from scaling its engineering organization and microservices with Kubernetes.
2017 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017 (Austin)¶
- case study · Cost-effective Compute Clusters with Spot and Pre-emptible Instances - Bich Le & Arun Sriraman. Speakers share how they ran cost-effective Kubernetes compute clusters on spot and pre-emptible instances.
- concept · Local Ephemeral Storage Resource Management - Jing Xu, Google
2018 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 (Copenhagen)¶
- concept · Resource Management WG Deep Dive – Vishnu Kannan, Google (Intermediate Skill Level)
- concept · What’s in the Box? Resource Management in Kubernetes - Louise Daly & Ivan Coughlan, Intel. Intel engineers explain how Kubernetes resource management works for CPU, memory and devices.
- concept · Inside Kubernetes Resource Management (QoS) – Mechanics and Lessons from the Field - Michael Gasch. Explains the mechanics of Kubernetes resource management and QoS classes, with lessons from the field.
2018 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 (Seattle)¶
2019 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2019 (Shanghai)¶
- concept · Co-Location of CPU and GPU Workloads with High Resource Efficiency - Penghao Cen & Jian He
- concept · The Real Costs of Open Source Sustainability - VM (Vicky) Brasseur, Juniper Networks
- concept · Minimizing GPU Cost for Your Deep Learning on Kubernetes - Kai Zhang & Yang Che, Alibaba
2019 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 (Barcelona)¶
- case study · Service Meshes: At What Cost? - Lee Calcote, Layer5 & Girish Ranganathan, SolarWinds — What, Layer5, SolarWinds
- case study · Running Kubernetes on Ephemeral Infrastructure - Greg DeArment & Vlad Ungureanu — Greg DeArment & Vlad Ungureanu's company. Speakers share their experience running Kubernetes on ephemeral infrastructure in production.
- concept · Treating Network Assets as Scheduleable Resources - Vinothkumar Siddharth, Amazon. Presents an approach to treating network assets as schedulable resources in Kubernetes.
2019 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 (San Diego)¶
- case study · Lightning Talk: How the Observability Team at Spotify Radically Decreased... Lauren Muhlhauser — Spotify. Spotify's observability team describes how it radically decreased observability costs or usage.
- concept · Mitigating Noisy Neighbours: Advanced Container Resource Management - Alexander Kanevskiy, Intel. Intel's talk on how advanced container resource management can mitigate noisy neighbors.
2020 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 - Virtual¶
- concept · FinOps Summit: Cost Visibility and Optimization in Kubernetes
- concept · Autoscaling and Cost Optimization on Kubernetes: From 0 to 100 - Guy Templeton & Jiaxin Shan
2020 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 - Virtual¶
2021 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021¶
- case study · Migrating GitLab.com to Kubernetes: How Multiple Clusters Saved Cost - John Skarbek, Gitlab — Multiple Clusters, Gitlab
2022 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022¶
- concept · Why Kubernetes Can't Get Around FinOps – Cost Management Best Pra... Vanessa Kantner & Manuela Latz
- concept · Getting the Optimal Service Efficiency That Autoscalers Won’t Give You - Mauro Pessina, Moviri
- concept · How Lombard Odier Deployed VPA to Increase Resource Usage Efficiency - Vincent Sevel
2022 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022¶
- concept · Sustainability Research the Cloud Native Way - Chen Wang, IBM & Huamin Chen, Red Hat
- concept · Balancing Yin (Community) And Yang (Company) In OSS - Nikhita Raghunath & Kiran Mova, VMware. Discusses balancing community and company interests in open source projects.
- concept · How to Get Involved in CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG - Marlow Weston & Huamin Chen
2023 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023¶
- case study · When FinOps Meets Cloud Native – How We Reduce Cloud Cost with Cloud... - Qiming Hu & Jesse Meng
- concept · Enhance Workload QoS with Pluggable and Customizable Smarter Runtimes - Rougang Han & Kang Zhang. Presents pluggable, customizable runtimes to improve workload QoS.
- concept · Balancing Cost and Quality in OpenTelemetry: An Evaluation of Sampling Policies - Zhu Jiekun, Quwan
- concept · Building a Fine-Grained and Intelligent Resource Management System on Kubernetes - He Cao & Wei Shao
2023 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023¶
- concept · Node Resource Management: The Big Picture
- concept · Sustainability Through Accountability in a CNCF Ecosystem - Yuval Lifshitz & Huamin Chen, Red Hat
- concept · Scale Down Your Environmental Impact - Mary Karroqe & Zinnia Gibson, D2iQ. Covers how to reduce the environmental impact of Kubernetes workloads.
- concept · Wildfires, Firefighters and Sustainability - Learnings from... - Nabarun Pal & Madhav Jivrajani
2023 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023¶
- case study · Kube-Costbusters: Optimizing Kubernetes Clusters for Efficiency... Rachel Leekin & Antoinette Mills. Talk on optimizing Kubernetes clusters for cost efficiency, likely sharing practitioner lessons.
- case study · Kubernetes Confessions: Tales of Overspending and Redemption - Becky Pauley & David Collom — Cast AI. Talk recounting real Kubernetes overspending stories and how costs were reduced.
- concept · Inflections and Reflections from Kubernetes SIG ContribEx on Community Growth & Sustainability.... SIG ContribEx reflects on Kubernetes community growth and sustainability.
- concept · CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG Updates and Information - Marlow Weston & Niki Manoledaki. CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG update on its activities and initiatives.
- concept · Node Size Matters - Running K8s as Cheaply as Possible - Alex Meijer & Michael Dresser, Stackwatch. Analyzes how node size affects cost and how to run Kubernetes as cheaply as possible.
- concept · Kubernetes Infra SIG: Intro and Updates - Arnaud Meukam, VMware & Benjamin Elder, Google. The Kubernetes Infra SIG introduces its work and gives updates on running the project's community infrastructure.
- concept · Environmentally Sustainable AI via Power-Aware Batch Scheduling - Atanas Atanasov & Daniel Wilson. Presents power-aware batch scheduling as a way to reduce the environmental impact of AI workloads.
- concept · Where's Your Money Going? the Beginners Guide to Measuring Kubernete... Mark Poko & JuanJo Ciarlante. Beginner's guide to measuring and attributing Kubernetes costs.
- concept · Sustainability and Efficiency: Environmentally-Friendly Software Development with... Davide Bianchi
- concept · Building Carbon Awareness with KEDA: Taking the First Step Towards Sustainability - Paul Yu
2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit + AI_dev China 2024¶
- concept · Boosting LLM Development and Training Efficiency: Automated Parallelization with Min... - Yiren Xing
- concept · CubeFS Boosts Efficiency of AI Production | CubeFS提高了AI生产的效率 - Chi He, OPPO
- concept · Constructing the 10x Efficiency of Cloud-Native AI Infrastructure - Peter Pan, DaoCloud & 秋萍 戴
- concept · Uniting Sustainability and Edge Computing: Kepler & Open Horizon on... - Peng Hui Jiang & David Yao
- concept · Boundaryless Computing: Optimizing LLM Performance, Cost, and Efficiency in...- Jian Zhu & Kai Zhang
- concept · Implementing Fine-Grained and Pluggable Container Resource Management Leverag...- Qiang Ren & He Cao. Describes a fine-grained, pluggable approach to container resource management in Kubernetes.
2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024¶
- case study · Squeeze Your K8s: How We Adopt Time-Series Forecasting Models in FinOps... Irvin Lim & Nicholas Kwan
- case study · Assessing Service Mesh's Net Worth: A Pragmatic Onboarding - Adrien Gillard, Decathlon — Decathlon. Decathlon assesses the value of a service mesh and describes its pragmatic onboarding approach.
- case study · Reducing Cross-Zone Egress at Spotify with Custom gRPC Load Balancing — Spotify. Spotify reduced cross-zone egress costs by implementing custom gRPC load balancing.
- concept · Saving the Planet One Cluster at a Time: Operationalising Sustainability in Kubernetes
- concept · Trimaran: Load-Aware Scheduling for Power Efficiency and Performance Stability
- concept · To Infinity and Beyond: Seamless Autoscaling with in-Place Resource Resize for Kubernetes Pods. Explains in-place resource resize for Kubernetes pods and how it enables seamless autoscaling.
- concept · Cloud Native Sustainability Efforts in the Community - TAG Environmental Sustainability
- concept · Empowering Efficiency: PEAKS - Orchestrating Power-Aware Kubernetes Scheduling
- concept · Cloud-Agnostic Approach to Bin-Packing Pods in Managed Kubernetes in AWS, GCP and Azure. Cloud-agnostic approach to bin-packing pods in managed Kubernetes across AWS, GCP and Azure.
- concept · Advanced Resource Management for Running AI/ML Workloads with Kueue - Michał Woźniak, Yuki Iwai. Covers advanced resource management features in Kueue for running AI/ML workloads.
- concept · AI-Assisted Runbooks - Instigating Precision and Efficiency in Kubernetes Operations. Shows how AI-assisted runbooks can make Kubernetes operations more precise and efficient.
- concept · Sustainable Computing: Measuring Application Energy Consumption in Kubernetes Environments with K.... Shows how to measure application energy consumption in Kubernetes environments.
2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2024¶
- concept · Policy-Driven Cost Optimization in Kubernetes with Kyverno | Project Lightning Talk
- concept · Lightning Talk: Have No Fear When Boskos Is Here - Amulya Meka, IBM. Lightning talk on using Boskos to manage shared test resources.
2024 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2024 - Salt Lake City¶
- case study · Cloud Native Sustainability Speedrun: Tools from Infrastructure to Applicati... S. Pathak, S. Narang
- case study · The Node Tetris Rabbit Hole: Why Your Binpacking Might Be Underperforming - Hannah Taub, Adobe Inc. — Adobe. Adobe investigates why its node binpacking underperforms and what it learned.
- concept · Exceeded Your Validation Cost Budget? Now What? - Joel Speed, Red Hat
- concept · Pod Power: Liberating Kubernetes Users from Container Resource Micromanagement - D. Narang, P. Hunt. Presents pod-level resource specifications that reduce per-container resource micromanagement in Kubernetes.
- concept · The Spice Must Flow Green: CNCF's Environmental Sustainability TAG - M. Warnicke (Weston), S. Pathak
- concept · Unlocking Cost Savings & New Possibilities: Your Guide to Prometheus Remote W... C. Styan, B. Płotka
- concept · Platform Performance Optimization for AI - a Resource Management Perspective- A. Kervinen, D. Narang
- concept · Building Reliable Cross-Cloud Kubernetes Clusters on Spot Instances with Drafter and.. F. Pojtinger
- concept · Lightning Talk: Evaluating Scheduler Efficiency for AI/ML Jobs Using Custom Resourc... D. Shmulevich
- panel · Open Source 2.0: The Maintainers' Perspective - Panel. Maintainers discuss the evolving state of open source.
2025 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2025 (Hong Kong)¶
- concept · Portrait Service: AI-Driven PB-Scale Data Mining for Cost Optimization and... Yuji Liu & Zhiheng Sun
- concept · Lightning Talk: Disaster Recovery - How IaCaC and Kubernetes Enables Cost Efficiency... Sandy Wang
- other · Lightning Talk: Empowering Sustainable Living With ORES: A Cloud N... Chris Xie & Karl Xiofeng Yang. Lightning talk on using ORES, a cloud native approach, to support sustainable living.
2025 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 - London¶
- concept · Data Processing Efficiency: Optimizing Batch Workloads on Kubernetes With Custom... Hichem Kenniche
- concept · Taming the Beast: Advanced Resource Management With Kubernetes - Lucy Sweet & Dawn Chen. Covers advanced Kubernetes resource management techniques.
- concept · Green AI in Cloud Native Ecosystems: Strategies for Sustainability... Vincent Caldeira & Tamar Eilam
- concept · Practical Zombie Hunting for Kubernetes Users - Holly Cummins, Red Hat. Practical guidance on finding and eliminating idle zombie workloads in Kubernetes clusters.
- concept · Balancing Cost and Efficiency: Day2 Optimization of Multi-Cluster AI Infrastructure - Kevin Wang. Discusses day-2 optimization of multi-cluster AI infrastructure to balance cost and efficiency.
- concept · Mastering Efficiency in Argo CD: Scaling Smarter, Not Costlier - Alexander Matyushentsev, Akuity
- concept · SIG-Node: Intro and Deep Dive - Sergey Kanzhelev, Google; Francesco Romani & Peter Hunt, Red Hat. Introduces SIG-Node and gives a deep dive into its current work on the kubelet and node-level features.
- concept · Streamlined Efficiency: Unshackling Kubernetes Image Volumes for Rapid A... Esteban Rey & Yifan Yuan
- concept · Project Lightning Talk: Kepler Project Updates - Sunyanan Choochotkaew, Maintainer. Lightning talk on recent updates to the Kepler energy-monitoring project.
- concept · Autonomous Al Agents for Cloud Cost Analysis - Ilya Lyamkin, Spotify
- concept · Beyond Security: Leveraging OPA for FinOps in Kubernetes - Sathish Kumar Venkatesan
- concept · Streamlined Efficiency: Unshackling Kubernetes Image Volumes for Rapid AI Model... E. Rey & Y. Yuan
- tutorial · More Data Please: Hands on Green Cloud Experiments - Leonard Pahlke & Antonio Di Turi. Hands-on experiments for measuring and improving the energy footprint of cloud workloads.
2025 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025¶
- concept · In-Place Pod Resize in Kubernetes: Dynamic Resource Management Without... Tim Allclair & Mofi Rahman
- concept · LLMs on Kubernetes: Squeeze 5x GPU Efficiency With Cache, Route, Repea... Yuhan Liu & Suraj Deshmukh. Shows how caching, routing and replication on Kubernetes can improve GPU efficiency for LLM serving.
- concept · But What About Reliability? - The Multi-Million Dollar Kubernetes Cost Op... Zain Malik & Nibir Bora
- concept · Surviving to Thriving: Building an Open Source Business in the Era of Rugpulls... Michael Lieberman. Discusses how to build a sustainable open source business in an era of license rugpulls.
- concept · Unleash the Power of Inplace Pod Resource Resizing for Startup and Cost... Zhang Zhen & Yuxing Yuan
- concept · The Missing Manual for Open Source Community Sustainability - Taylor Dolezal & Erica Hughberg
- concept · Project Lightning Talk: Invisible FinOps and Compliance: Shift Left With Cloud Custodian - Sonny Shi
2026 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026¶
- case study · 8 Million Tasks Daily: Driving Efficiency in Multi-Tenant Data... JIanxiang Sun & Shuangkun Tian. Reports on running 8 million tasks daily in a multi-tenant data platform and the efficiency gains achieved.
2026 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026¶
- case study · From Idle to Savings: Building a Global Scheduler for Cost‑Efficient Data P... Rainie Li & Ang Zhang. Speakers describe building a global scheduler that cuts idle cost for their data platforms.
- case study · Fusing FinOps, Forecasting, and Kubernetes at Scale - Ankur Singh & Satyam Bhardwaj. Presents how FinOps and forecasting are combined to manage Kubernetes costs at scale; the speakers' organization is not named in the title.
- case study · From NLB Sprawl To Mesh Efficiency: How Skyscanner Handles 60M Reque... John Clark & Steven Thwaites — Skyscanner. Skyscanner describes moving from NLB sprawl to a mesh to handle 60M requests efficiently.
- case study · How Manual OTel Instrumentation Saves More Than Just Money - Juliano Costa & Yuri Oliveira. Argues that manual OTel instrumentation reduces observability cost and more, based on the speakers' own experience.
- case study · Preventing S3 Cost Storms: Applying Cortex’s Efficiency Lessons to I/O-Heav... A. Fishman-Lichterman — Cortex. Applies Cortex's lessons on preventing S3 cost spikes to I/O-heavy workloads.
- concept · Project Lightning Talk: OpenCost: Cost And Resource Management - Rajith Attapattu, Maintainer
- concept · AI Agents & Platform Engineering: Efficiency Boost... Hasith K, Vincent C, Sara Q, Idit L & Carlos S
- concept · OpenCost - Cost and Resource Management Deep Dive - Rajith Attapattu, Randoli
- concept · TAG Operational Resilience: Sustainability Month To... Mario F, Alolita S, Carol V, N Pal & Saiyam P
- concept · How to Build Your Cloud Native Balance Sheet - Danielle Cook, Akamai & Simon Forster, Stackegy. Explains how to build a cloud native balance sheet to understand costs and value.
- concept · Istio's Ambient Mesh: The Real Cost of Sidecar-less Tracing - Mofesola Babalola & Hannah Olukoye
- concept · The Quiet Work of Forever: Sustaining Open Source Communities - O. Hope Amaechi-Okorie, JSON Schema. Discusses how to sustain open source communities over the long term, drawing on JSON Schema.
- tutorial · Tutorial: Full-Stack Observability on a Budget: A Guide to Strategic Sampling and Da... Pavol Loffay. A hands-on guide to reducing observability costs through strategic sampling and data reduction.
2026 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026¶
- case study · Kubernetes Ate the Budget: How We Made Cost a Platform Responsibi... Bhavani Indukuri & Aman Chandna. Speakers explain how they made cost a platform responsibility after Kubernetes costs got out of hand.
- case study · Sponsored Demo: The True Cost of Building at Machine Speed - Dan Lorenc, Chainguard — Machine, Chainguard
- concept · The Hidden Cost of ML Data Lifecycles in Kubernetes - Yashasvi Misra, Pure Storage
- concept · The Invisible Tax: How Data Format Conversions Drive up Telemetry Pipeline Costs - Cijo Thomas. Explains how data format conversions in telemetry pipelines add hidden cost.
- panel · Observability 2.0: Shifting Left From Reactive Mon... Kokilavani K, RK Gupta, Sivakumar K & Suresh K. Panel with Intuit, Atlassian and Cloudera practitioners on the shift from traditional monitoring to LLM-assisted 'observability 2.0'.
2026 · KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026¶
- case study · Repurposing OpenTelemetry Traces as Test Data: Breaking the Cost Barrier in System… Y. Fujikane. Describes reusing OpenTelemetry traces as test data to lower the cost of system testing.
- concept · Sustainability by Design: Leveraging DRA for Energy-Efficient… S. Choochotkaew & F. Kundattil