Cost Optimization & FinOps
Part 19
palaniappan p 6 min
Amazon EKS Pricing: The $73 Control Plane, the $438/Month Extended Support Trap, and the Auto Mode Markup
EKS control planes are $73/month per cluster. Stay on a Kubernetes version beyond its 14-month standard support and Extended Support kicks in at +$0.50/hour — $438/month per cluster, a 5× multiplier. EKS Auto Mode adds a ~12% markup over standard EC2 + EBS for managed compute simplicity. The compute side (Karpenter, Spot, Graviton) is where most of the bill lives.