What is Control plane price?

A control plane price covers the cluster management layer that a managed Kubernetes service runs for you, such as the API server and scheduling, and is charged on top of the worker nodes you use. It is usually a flat hourly rate that does not fall when a cluster is scaled down. Alibaba Cloud lists $0.09 per hour, Amazon EKS lists $0.10, Aruba Cloud lists €0.026 and Astronomer lists $0.35. For a cluster running continuously, this fee is a fixed part of the monthly bill; for development clusters that sit idle, it is the part that costs the most for the least use.