Best of 2025: CAST AI Report Surfaces Massive Kubernetes Cloud Infrastructure Waste
Cloud Native Now, Friday, January 2nd, 2026
CAST AI published a report that shines a light on the massive amount of infrastructure resources being wasted by Kubernetes clusters. Organizations, on average, only use 13% of provisioned CPUs and 20% of memory when deploying clusters that have 50 to 1,000 processors, according to the report.
Based on an analysis of more than 4,000 clusters running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure between January 1 and December 31, 2023, the report finds overprovisioning of infrastructure resources coupled with low utilization of spot instances on cloud services is leading to a massive waste of resources.
Laurent Gil, chief product officer for CAST AI, said the larger the Kubernetes environment, the lower the waste. For example, the report finds large clusters with 1,000 to 30,000 processors, on average, only use 17% of provisioned CPUs.