Guides: AWS costs and EKS upgrades
Written for engineers who own the AWS bill without being FinOps specialists. Every figure comes from AWS's own pricing pages or documentation, with the link.
12 AWS cost cuts that don't need a re-architecture
Most AWS savings that don't need a redesign come from the same twelve places: oversized resources and pod requests, non-production running 24/7, orphaned volumes, NAT gateway traffic to S3, gp2 volumes, missing Savings Plans, no Spot, x86 by default, S3 without lifecycle rules, logs kept forever, unused public IPv4 addresses, and EKS clusters on extended support. Each one can be found with a few commands.
Updated November 3, 2026 · Read the guide
The real cost of EKS extended support
On Amazon EKS, a cluster in standard support costs $0.10 per hour. Fourteen months after its version is released on EKS, it moves to extended support at $0.60 per hour, automatically and by default: about $438 a month instead of $73, or $4,380 more per cluster per year. After twelve more months, AWS upgrades the control plane on its own, with no notice and no rollback.
Updated November 3, 2026 · Read the guide
EKS upgrade checklist: from 1.31 to 1.35 without breakage
An EKS upgrade goes one minor version at a time: inventory deprecated APIs and upgrade insights, align nodes, upgrade the control plane, then nodes and add-ons, and repeat for the next hop. Since July 2026, EKS can roll back to the previous minor version within 7 days, with conditions. For several hops in a row or a critical cluster, a blue/green cluster is still the safest net.
Updated November 3, 2026 · Read the guide
Frequently asked questions
Are the prices in these guides current?
They are AWS public list prices checked on November 3, 2026, before discounts and taxes. Prices vary by region and change over time, so each guide links to the AWS page it uses.