§ The blog
Stop leaking money in the cloud
Field notes on GKE rightsizing, idle resources, and the FinOps habits that keep your bill honest. Practical, no fluff, written by people who dogfood their own scanner.
Are GCP Static IP Addresses Free? (The Honest Answer)
Short answer: no, not anymore. Google charges for external IPv4 addresses, and the idle reserved ones cost the most. Here's exactly what's free, what isn't, and which IPs are quietly wasting money.
Read →Does GKE Charge a Cluster Management Fee?
Yes: $0.10 per cluster per hour, about $72 a month, on every GKE cluster regardless of size or mode. One cluster is effectively free. Here's how the fee works and what it does (and doesn't) cover.
5 June 2026Why Is My GKE Cluster So Expensive? 7 Places to Look First
A high GKE bill almost always comes down to the same handful of culprits, and the management fee isn't one of them. Here are the seven things to check, in order of how much money they usually hide.
5 June 2026Requests vs Usage: The GKE Mistake Quietly Costing You Thousands
The single biggest source of wasted GKE spend isn't exotic. It's the gap between what your pods request and what they actually use. Here's how to find it and claw it back.
4 June 2026Zombie Namespaces: Finding the Idle GKE Workloads Eating Your Budget
Whole namespaces sit in production reserving compute while doing essentially nothing. Here's how to find these zombies without nuking something that's deliberately on standby.
2 June 2026Orphaned Persistent Disks: The Silent Line Item on Every Cloud Bill
Unattached disks keep billing whether anything uses them or not. They're the easiest cloud waste to fix, and the easiest to never notice. Here's how to hunt them down.
31 May 2026Right-Sizing GKE Node Pools Without Taking Down Production
Pod requests are only half the story. If your node pools are the wrong shape, you pay for allocatable capacity nobody can schedule onto. Here's how to fix the pool, safely.
29 May 2026Spot and Preemptible Nodes: When They Save You 70%, and When They Bite
Spot capacity is the biggest single discount in cloud computing, often 60-90% off. It's also the easiest way to cause an outage if you put the wrong workload on it. Here's the dividing line.
27 May 2026Idle Load Balancers and Reserved IPs: Small Line Items, Big Annual Waste
Nobody notices a few pounds a month for a reserved IP. Notice forty of them across a dozen projects, billing for three years, and it's a different conversation. The cloud's small fixed costs add up.
25 May 2026P95, Not Average: How to Read Cloud Monitoring Like a FinOps Engineer
Averages lie about cloud usage. If you right-size on the mean you'll cause outages; if you right-size on the max you'll never save anything. The 95th percentile is where the truth lives.
23 May 2026Committed Use Discounts: Are You Leaving 30% on the Table?
If you're running a steady baseline of compute on-demand, you're paying the tourist price. Commitments trade flexibility for a big discount, but only after you've right-sized, not before.
21 May 2026Orphaned Snapshots and Stale Images: Your Storage Bill's Dirty Secret
Backups are good. Backups of disks that no longer exist, kept forever, with no lifecycle policy, are just a storage bill you forgot to read. Here's how to tell them apart.
19 May 2026The 20-Minute Monthly GKE Cost-Hygiene Checklist
Cloud waste isn't a one-time cleanup; it grows back. Here's a tight monthly routine that keeps your GKE bill honest in about twenty minutes, plus the order to work it in.
17 May 2026