Developers and DevOps teams working in Kubernetes tend to focus primarily on performance and pay little attention to the cost side of things. When workloads are running smoothly and meeting SLAs, budget considerations often take a backseat until some external force (normally in the form of the finance team) demands that it’s optimized.
However, the reality is that ignoring cost until finance steps in only leads to inefficiency and wasted resources, and eventually, quite a lot of work on cost optimization. This cycle, where costs are forgotten and then aggressively optimized under pressure, drains considerable time and energy that could be better spent on other strategic initiatives.