A new guide details building a cost-efficient microservices platform on Azure Kubernetes Service. The approach starts with minimal baseline capacity and uses Terraform for provisioning. The core strategy avoids provisioning for peak load, instead letting the cluster autoscaler drive node count based on actual demand.

Key cost-saving tactics include using Spot node pools for fault-tolerant workloads, isolated with taints and tolerations. For stateful services like PostgreSQL, the guide recommends managed services with private networking, not cost experiments. It also replaces managed log ingestion with Prometheus and Loki, storing logs in inexpensive object storage.

Beyond cost, the implementation emphasizes security and operational stability. It uses Workload Identity to eliminate Kubernetes secrets, enforcing Azure RBAC at runtime. Autoscaling is tuned with stabilization windows to prevent churn. The guide argues that intentional trade-offs—not clever tricks—produce systems that are predictable, resilient, and easy to evolve.