k8s-cost

k8s-cost is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from yindia/rootcause. It costs 0 tokens per session (2,288 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for reducing Kubernetes running costs by comparing actual resource use with what workloads request. It covers workload sizing, autoscaling signals, storage cleanup, and node-pool efficiency.

In plain words
What is it for?
Investigating high cluster spend, right-sizing workloads, reviewing HPA and VPA behaviour, finding unused storage, and improving node utilisation.
Why use it?
It helps find resources that are idle, oversized, poorly scaled, or no longer needed while keeping reliability requirements in view.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yindia/rootcause/k8s-cost
Any agent
npx skills add yindia/rootcause --skill k8s-cost
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yindia/rootcause

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for k8s-cost

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yindia/rootcause/k8s-cost.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yindia/rootcause/k8s-cost)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yindia/rootcause/k8s-cost"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yindia/rootcause/k8s-cost.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,288 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00000 $0.02288
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01144
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00458
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00229

Measured 6d ago against content hash f717f7731e74, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

k8s-cost scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/claude/k8s-cost/SKILL.md · 345 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 345 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: k8s-cost

Kubernetes cost optimization framework using usage evidence, right-sizing, autoscaling signal quality, storage hygiene, and node pool efficiency.

This skill focuses on actionable cost reduction without sacrificing reliability.

Trigger Phrases

Use this skill when the user mentions:

  • cluster spend too high
  • reduce k8s cost
  • overprovisioned workloads
  • idle resources
  • right sizing
  • node utilization low
  • too many nodes
  • expensive node families
  • vpa recommendations
  • hpa waste or thrashing
  • orphaned pvcs
  • immediate cost wins

RootCause Tools Allowed

Only use these tool names in this skill:

  • k8s.resource_usage
  • k8s.best_practice
  • k8s.vpa_debug
  • k8s.hpa_debug
  • k8s.storage_debug
  • k8s.overview
  • k8s.describe
  • k8s.list
  • karpenter.nodepool_debug
  • karpenter.nodeclass_debug

Cost Optimization Principles

  1. Start with utilization truth, not YAML intent.
  2. Fix biggest waste categories first.
  3. Separate immediate savings from architecture changes.
  4. Preserve SLOs while reducing slack.
  5. Re-run measurements after each change wave.

End-to-End Cost Workflow

Phase 1: Baseline and Scope

Use k8s.overview for macro shape:

namespace: payments

Then use k8s.resource_usage for live pressure:

namespace: payments
includePods: true
includeNodes: true
sortBy: cpu

And run memory view:

namespace: payments
includePods: true
includeNodes: true
sortBy: memory

Capture:

  • top pod CPU consumers
  • top pod memory consumers
  • node utilization spread
  • namespaces with low utilization but high reservation

Phase 2: Workload Right-Sizing

For each top consumer and top overprovisioned candidate:

  1. k8s.describe workload to capture requests/limits.
  2. k8s.best_practice to find missing/unsafe resource config.
  3. k8s.vpa_debug for recommendation baseline.

Example k8s.best_practice:

kind: Deployment
name: payments-api
namespace: payments

Example k8s.vpa_debug:

namespace: payments
name: payments-api-vpa

Read the full file on GitHub · 345 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 345 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A f717f7731e74

Subscribe to this mod's changes

k8s-cost is a skill published in the GitHub repository yindia/rootcause (42 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,288 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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