EKS Cluster Storage Cut After Audit Finds 200Gi Nodes Far Exceed Actual Usage

An infrastructure review of an Amazon EKS cluster found that worker nodes provisioned with 200Gi of root storage were consuming significantly less disk space than allocated under observed operating conditions. Engineers examined key storage paths including container images, kubelet data, and system logs to understand real consumption rather than relying on free-space metrics alone. The investigation was part of an ongoing series of capacity optimizations that had previously addressed CPU bottlenecks and oversized resource requests, which reduced the cluster from five worker nodes to four. Unlike earlier findings where capacity needed to be increased, this audit pointed in the opposite direction, suggesting the storage allocation could be safely reduced. The conclusion was not that 200Gi would never be needed, but that the current provisioning exceeded what the workload and operating conditions actually required.