Moving to Kubernetes opens the door to a world of possibilities, the amount of workloads that can be run and the flexibility it provides. However this comes at a cost on managing the resources used by many applications and teams. Java applications can be specially challenging when running in containers.

At Adobe Experience Manager we run our cloud service on more than 40 clusters. We make extensive use of standard Kubernetes capabilities to reduce resource usage and we have also built some solutions at several levels of the stack to improve it.

From autoscaling to workload hibernation, from automated resource requests to Kubernetes Jobs, we have experimented with and implemented several features that decrease our resource usage and lower the cost of running many Kubernetes clusters at scale. Both at workload resource level and also at achieving higher density clusters that reduce the number of clusters we need and the operating costs.