Platform & DevOps·Placement, resources and the pod lifecycle
the cluster is at ninety percent booked and forty percent used, and adding one more workload still needs a whole new node.
Bin packing
Also calledpacking efficiency, node packing
Fitting workloads of assorted sizes onto as few nodes as possible. It is the lever that converts requests into a bill: efficiency is set by how honest requests are and by the ratio of the largest workload to the node size, since one big request can leave an unusable remainder on every node. It is also the reason a cluster can be simultaneously expensive and underused, which reads as a paradox until you look at requests rather than usage.