something i didn't fully appreciate until we hit ~15 clusters: EKS and GKE are quietly charging you $73/month per cluster just to exist. AKS doesn't. at 40 clusters that's basically $35k/year you're paying for nothing before a single pod runs. wrote this up after going through the numbers more carefully than i probably should have on a friday afternoon. cross-AZ charges on AWS especially are sneakier than the control plane fees imo Has anyone here actually felt the Azure Monitor Log Analytics costs at scale, the per-GB number kept coming up in my research but i haven't seen many real war stories on it. https://dev.to/muskan_8abedcc7e12/eks-vs-gke-vs-aks-a-finops-cost-comparison-in-2026-2m12