Reading a Kubernetes bill: what each line item actually means

The bill arrived on a Tuesday, up 38% on last month, and finance wanted to know why by Friday. The attachment was 2,400 lines of m5.2xlarge , persistent-disk-ssd , network-inter-region-egress . Nothing that mapped to a namespace, a team, or anything anyone in the room recognised. If you run Kubernetes in production you've had this week, or you will. And the thing that makes it hard isn't the size of the number. It's that the cloud bill and the cluster are describing two entirely different system