Question

A retail company runs a chatty microservices application on a regional GKE cluster spread across three zones. The finance team flags a steadily rising 'inter-zone data transfer' line item in the billing export, even though overall traffic volume is flat. The services communicate heavily via Kubernetes Services, and pods are scheduled arbitrarily across zones. You must reduce the inter-zone egress cost without sacrificing the resilience of a multi-zone deployment. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Enable Topology Aware Routing (topology-aware hints) on the Kubernetes Services so traffic is preferentially routed to endpoints in the same zone as the client.

Answer

Migrate the cluster to a single-zone configuration so that all pod-to-pod traffic stays within one zone.

Answer

Add a node taint and pod anti-affinity rules to spread pods more evenly across all three zones.

Answer

Enable Cloud CDN in front of the internal services to cache responses and reduce backend calls.