Last month I interviewed with two teams running multi-AZ EKS on AWS; both prioritized active-active architectures, zone-failure game days, and 99.99% SLOs. Compensation bands were 10–15% below what I saw in 2022 for similar scale, and more emphasis on cost controls over burst capacity. Are others seeing the market push for greater resiliency and horizontal scale while tightening budgets?
Same here, — interviewed last quarter with a multi‑AZ EKS team pushing 99.99% but offers about 12% under 2022 and strict spend limits. What helped us was Karpenter consolidation with a small on‑demand floor and per‑AZ Spot burst plus topology spread; cut about 25% while keeping active‑active: https://karpenter.sh. Caveat: pin SLO‑critical pods to on‑demand with taints/affinity during game days or you’ll get burned.
I’m seeing the same; to keep “99.99%” while meeting spend caps, we disabled cross-zone LB on NLBs and kept traffic AZ-local with topologySpreadConstraints — cut transfer about 18% and made game days quieter. Caveat: set PDBs and priority classes, or rollouts + node drains will bite you. Anyone else enable zonal pinning only on critical paths?
@katherine72 we clawed back transfer costs by setting externalTrafficPolicy=Local on our NLB-backed Services so requests stayed AZ‑local; it kept 99.99% intact, but we kept a small per‑AZ buffer or rollouts and node drains would bite — did you try that?
Kept ‘99.99%’ moving nodes to Graviton and gp3; 2022 comps down about 12%, watch Spot churn.
We held “99.99% SLOs” on multi-AZ EKS by switching from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter with consolidation and per-priority provisioners, so only critical namespaces keep headroom; that cut idle about 20% without overprovisioning. Small gotcha: consolidation can spike evictions on scale-down, so tighten PDBs and warm paths before rolling it out broadly. If you haven’t tried it, the config is straightforward: https://karpenter.sh/.