49% of organizations running Kubernetes in production report rising infrastructure costs since adoption — 17% say the increase has been significant. If you've felt that creep on your own cluster's bill and immediately started reading about spot instances, Karpenter, and multi-year commitment discounts, you're not wrong to look there eventually. But you're skipping a step. Before any of that, there's a "Phase 1" cleanup that most teams never do properly — and on its own, it typically recovers ...