# Stale Completed or Failed Fargate Pods Causing Direct Billing and Capacity Waste

Canonical: https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/inefficiencies/stale-completed-or-failed-fargate-pods-causing-direct-billing-and-capacity-waste

[Cloud Efficiency Hub](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub) 

# Stale Completed or Failed Fargate Pods Causing Direct Billing and Capacity Waste

## Explanation

This inefficiency occurs when Kubernetes Jobs or CronJobs running on EKS Fargate leave completed or failed pod objects in the cluster indefinitely. Although the workload execution has finished, AWS keeps the underlying Fargate microVM running to allow log inspection and final status checks. As a result, vCPU, memory, and networking resources remain allocated and billable until the pod object is explicitly deleted.

Over time, large numbers of stale Job pods can generate  direct compute charges  as well as consume ENIs and IP addresses, leading to both unnecessary spend and capacity pressure. This pattern is common in batch-processing and scheduled workloads that lack automated cleanup.

## Relevant Billing Model

On EKS Fargate, billing for vCPU and memory continues  as long as the pod object exists , even after a Job pod reaches a Completed (Succeeded or Failed) state. Fargate infrastructure is only released-and billing stops-when the pod object is deleted from the Kubernetes API server.

## Detection

- Review whether completed or failed Fargate pods persist long after Jobs finish

- Assess whether batch or CronJob workloads accumulate large numbers of historical pods

- Identify environments where Job execution completes but pod cleanup is not automated

## Remediation

- Enable automatic cleanup of finished Jobs using TTL-after-finished policies

- Configure CronJobs to retain minimal successful and failed job history

- Treat pod lifecycle cleanup as a required design consideration for Fargate-based batch workloads

## Relevant Documentation

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/fargate.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/fargate.html)

[https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/ttlafterfinished/](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/ttlafterfinished/)

[Submit Feedback](https://hub.pointfive.co/inefficiencies/stale-completed-or-failed-fargate-pods-causing-direct-billing-and-capacity-waste)

## At a glance

Reference

CER-0298

Cloud provider

AWS

Service

AWS EKS

Category

[Compute](https://www.pointfive.co/efficiency-hub/service-category/compute)

Inefficiency type

Unnecessary compute and networking charges

## Contributed by

- Tai Nguyen 

### Tai Nguyen

Senior Site Reliability Engineer @ Spartan

[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/taind772/)

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