Cast AI - EKS fully automated cost optimization and monitoring

What do you like best about the product?

It was great because it made it easy to optimize both costs and performance. It also offered a clear, at-a-glance view of wasted resources, which was really helpful when I needed to present supporting data to my colleagues and leadership.

What do you dislike about the product?

There’s still room for improvement when it comes to completeness, but I believe that’s something that will get better over time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Cast AI helps address real-time Kubernetes cost waste by dynamically autoscaling nodes and optimizing instance types. For us, it’s been valuable because it automatically reduces our cloud bill while also freeing our DevOps team from tedious, day-to-day infrastructure management.

What do you like best about the product?

I like how CAST AI gives me a clearer view of resource usage and helps identify optimization opportunities in our Kubernetes clusters. It makes Kubernetes costs feel less like a guessing game by providing visibility alongside optimization recommendations. This is genuinely useful for my day-to-day work, allowing me to focus on impactful changes rather than piecing everything together manually. I appreciate that it makes it easier to communicate spending details to people outside the DevOps team. CAST AI turns optimization into an ongoing process by keeping us aware of changing workloads, providing a clearer starting point for decisions without waiting for a cost spike. The tool's recommendations help transform detailed usage information into actionable next steps, which saves time and helps prioritize impactful work.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main thing I would improve is how easy it is to understand the reasoning and trade-offs behind an optimization recommendation. Saving money matters, but from a DevOps perspective, I also need to feel confident that a change would not affect workload stability. Clearer explanations, practical examples in the documentation, and a simpler way to find relevant settings would help with that. I don’t see it as a deal breaker. It’s more about making it easier to move from "this looks promising" to "I am comfortable applying it."

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use CAST AI to manage Kubernetes costs effectively, providing clear insights into resource usage and optimization opportunities. It simplifies cost management, replaces guesswork, and aids in decision-making, making cost explanations and spending decisions easier for my team.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about CAST AI is how effectively it automates cloud cost optimization without requiring constant manual intervention. The platform gives good visibility into our cloud environment, identifies areas where we can reduce unnecessary spend, and helps optimize resources based on actual usage. The automation and recommendations are particularly useful because they allow the team to focus on higher-value engineering work rather than continuously monitoring and adjusting infrastructure.

What do you dislike about the product?

The initial setup and configuration can take some time, especially when getting familiar with the platform and its different optimization options. Some recommendations may also require additional review before being implemented in a production environment. That said, once the platform is configured properly, the ongoing management is relatively straightforward.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

CAST AI is helping us address cloud cost management and resource optimization. It gives us better visibility into where cloud resources are being over- or under-utilized and helps automate optimization based on actual workload requirements. This reduces the amount of manual effort needed to manage infrastructure and helps us avoid unnecessary cloud spend, while allowing the engineering team to focus more on application and product priorities.

What do you like best about the product?

Cast AI allows us to scale based on the needs of our traffic while saving lots of money. The team members are amazing! Chuck, Manav, Jenny, and Nathan.

What do you dislike about the product?

There isn’t much we dislike about Cast AI. If anything, the main improvement we’d like to see is the ability to scale ElastiCache as well.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are wanting to scale horizontally now instead of vertically and that's a slow process so far.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Cast AI is how it actually takes the daily grind of managing Kubernetes costs off my plate. The automated rightsizing and bin-packing just quietly clean up overprovisioned resources without me having to babysit node groups or run constant audits. I like the UI We’ve seen solid cost drops (around 40% in our case) while performance stayed stable, and the Spot Instance handling has been surprisingly reliable fewer interruptions than I expected. Integrations with AWS, GCP, and Azure felt pretty seamless, and onboarding was straightforward we were up and running without a ton of hand-holding. Support has been responsive whenever we’ve had questions, which made the whole setup a lot less stressful. The real win is the time back: instead of spending hours every week tuning clusters, the team can focus on actual product work.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main thing that can feel a bit rough is the initial learning curve with the more advanced policies and node templates. If your team isn’t already deep into Kubernetes, it takes a little time to get comfortable with all the knobs and make sure everything is set up the way you want. The cost reporting is useful, but sometimes I wish it went a bit deeper or was easier to slice by team or workload without extra work. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it can slow things down when finance asks for more detailed breakdowns. Overall the tool still saves us a lot of time and money, these are just the small friction points we run into.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Cast AI we were constantly fighting overprovisioned clusters and unpredictable cloud bills. Our team spent a lot of time manually adjusting node groups, rightsizing workloads, and trying to catch underutilized resources before the invoice landed. Now the platform handles most of that automatically continuous rightsizing, bin-packing, and smarter Spot usage mean we run leaner without sacrificing performance. We’ve cut our Kubernetes spend by roughly 40% and freed up several hours a week that used to go into cluster babysitting. That time goes straight back into shipping features instead of firefighting infrastructure.

What do you like best about the product?

The biggest upside for us has been automated Kubernetes cost optimization. Cast AI continuously rightsizes our nodes and swaps them out for cheaper spot/right-fit instances, so our EKS cluster costs went down without us having to manually tune node groups. The autoscaler also responds to real pod demand much faster than the default cluster autoscaler, and the savings visibility in the console makes it straightforward to show the impact to stakeholders. Setup felt lightweight as well: connecting the cluster took minimal effort and didn’t disrupt any running workloads.

What do you dislike about the product?

The biggest downside for me is the limited visibility at the application level. It does a great job showing cost data for nodes and clusters, but I’d really like to see application details in that same view so I can connect savings and scaling behavior back to specific services.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It’s helped us address our infrastructure cost problem. Cast AI automatically optimizes our Kubernetes nodes, which reduces our cloud spend and saves the team from having to do manual capacity tuning.

What do you like best about the product?

less effort for the all things for eks-scaler

What do you dislike about the product?

when apply cast.ai on running state, it is difficult to set up hard.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

decrease cost.

What do you like best about the product?

Having the metrics and recommendations in a single place really helps app teams or ops teams scrutinize and apply rightsizing. The process can be done manually with a variety of tools, but a single place to tie it all together makes makes it much easier to teams to consume. Instead of a 'follow these docs for this manual process' message, we can tell teams, go here, and see what rightsizing can be applied. The experience is pretty straight forward, which is important for adoption. Plus the scaling is simpler to rollout, compared to manually configuring and managing scaling parameters via config files. While we have started small, there are measurable wins for the business case of expanding our use.

What do you dislike about the product?

I have no particular issues with the product, and working with the CastAI team has been a good experience.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It helps bring rightsizing and finops to the masses. For teams coming from an on-prem mentality, this is a hard transition for them, and CastAI makes that easier with dedicated, easy to use tooling.

What do you like best about the product?

The UI provides a good overall experience. As for the solution itself, it’s easy to integrate and makes it straightforward to configure metrics.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes it’s hard to modify the metrics I’ve already created for optimization. There’s also a lot of information on the screen, which can be confusing when I need to set something up.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

FinOps operations and the value returned in products.

What do you like best about the product?

I really like CAST AI for its simple and easy-to-use UI, especially from a Site Reliability Engineer's perspective. The combination of a straightforward interface, better visibility, and automated node balancing stands out to me. It's also great for node balancing and reducing costs, which are crucial for my work. The initial setup of CAST AI was easy and simple, making it hassle-free to get started.

What do you dislike about the product?

I think that CAST AI could benefit from better reporting and customization options. It would be more helpful if there were better ways to customize alerts, dashboards, and optimization policies. These improvements would really enhance the platform's utility for me.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use CAST AI for node balancing and cost reduction, benefiting from a simple UI, better visibility, and automated strategies.