As environments scale, GKE clusters tend to accumulate artifacts from ephemeral workloads, dev environments, or incomplete job execution. PVCs can continue to retain Persistent Disks, Services may continue to expose public IPs and provision load balancers, and node pools are often oversized for steady-state demand. This results in cloud spend that is not aligned with application activity.
Organizations that lack visibility into Kubernetes-level resource usage often miss these inefficiencies because GCP billing tools surface usage at the infrastructure level, not the Kubernetes object level.
GKE clusters incur costs for node VMs (in Standard mode) or pod resources and control plane (in Autopilot mode), Persistent Disks via PVCs, and external IP addresses and load balancers from exposed Services. Orphaned objects like unused volumes, idle services, and overprovisioned node pools continue to generate charges even when not tied to running workloads.
