spent way too long this week comparing EKS vs GKE vs AKS costs. the control plane thing, $73/month per cluster for EKS and GKE, $0 for AKS, i knew about it but never did the actual math. 40 clusters = $35k/year before any workloads exist. that's a headcount. wrote it all up : spot pricing, cross-AZ charges, storage, observability. the cross-AZ stuff on EKS especially. $0.01/GB doesn't sound like much until you realize how much pod-to-pod traffic crosses zones in a normal cluster. https://dev.to/muskan_8abedcc7e12/eks-vs-gke-vs-aks-a-finops-cost-comparison-in-2026-2m12