Design a cost-optimization strategy for a company running containerized workloads that has seen cloud costs grow 3x faster than usage over the past year.

Cover: right-sizing resource requests/limits based on actual observed utilization (Chapter 8/13 metrics) rather than initial guesses that were never revisited; identifying idle or over-provisioned replicas via utilization monitoring; using autoscaling to match capacity to actual demand curves instead of static peak-provisioned capacity; image size optimization (smaller images reduce registry storage and pull/transfer costs at scale); and evaluating spot/preemptible instances for appropriately fault-tolerant, stateless workloads — framed as a continuous practice (regular right-sizing reviews) r