2 min lesson
Identifying and removing waste
Work through this case: "An interviewer asks you to cut the EKS bill 25%. You're tempted to slash all pod requests to their bare minimum. What's the danger and what's a more defensible move?" Say what you would do and why.
Step 1 of 3
Attribution tells you where the money goes. This section is about getting it back. Waste in a fast-growing infra org is rarely one villain - it's a hundred small leaks that a clean attribution layer finally makes visible.
The discipline that separates a strong answer from a hand-wave is measurement. "We right-sized the cluster" is a story. "We cut node count 30% by dropping p95-padded requests and p99 latency held" is engineering. Quantify before and after, every time.