FinOps Kubernetes Operator

The problem

Non-production clusters run all night and all weekend at full replica count, paying for capacity nobody is using — and the obvious fix, scaling things down, is exactly the kind of automation that causes an outage when it gets one workload wrong.

Constraints

• Must never scale down a workload someone depends on
• Teams need an escape hatch they control themselves
• The operator's own failure must be safe — no action is better than a wrong action

Architecture

Key decisions

What was chosen, what it was chosen over, and why.

• Chose

  Sleep schedules annotated on the namespace

  Instead of

  Per-workload schedules or a central config file

  A team owns its namespace, so the schedule sits at the boundary the team already controls and every workload inside it inherits one intent rather than drifting apart.

• Chose

  System namespaces skipped unconditionally

  Instead of

  Relying on operators to annotate correctly

  kube-system and friends can never be scaled to zero by this operator regardless of configuration. The failure mode of a cost tool has to be inaction, never an outage.

• Chose

  Original replica count stored before scaling down

  Instead of

  Restoring to a fixed default

  Waking a workload has to return it to the size it actually was, not to whatever the chart shipped, or the operator silently resizes production-shaped environments overnight.