KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

A self-service multi-tenancy Kubernetes platform offers many benefits to application teams. In less than 2 years, American Airlines Shared K8 Platform has grown to over 1000+ deployments. Now that we built a resilient and secure platform, we must make it cost-effective to ensure long-term viability. This has the added benefit of reducing the carbon footprint of our platform. In the 2nd year, our platform grew by over 300% but costs increased by 500% as we added security, observability, and other features. How do we start to control costs without violating our self-service model? What is the reasonable amount to spend on Observability? What is a reasonable utilization goal and how do we get there? What level of cost optimization can we achieve without compromising our self-service model and maintaining the resiliency of our platform? We set out to address all these questions and this is our journey. In 4 months, we decreased the total Cost Per Utilized Core (CPUC) by 40%.