You Pay for Cluster Capacity, Not Average Usage
· 7 min read
Requests are not waste: teams use them to preserve schedulable capacity for bursts, startup spikes, and reliability. They also determine how workloads fit on nodes, so more headroom than a workload needs can block consolidation or occupy capacity another workload could use.
AstroPulse shows requests beside time-averaged usage for every cluster, namespace, and application. The gap starts an investigation; it does not prescribe a new request.

Compare requested headroom with average use, then decide whether the gap is intentional.