So the CISO finally got his way and we're deploying Aqua across our EKS footprint. The mandate is to "shift left" and enforce policy at the build *and* runtime phase. Fine. My job is to make sure the security team's warm fuzzies don't bankrupt us with compute overhead.
The initial architecture is straightforward: Aqua's Enforcer pods as DaemonSets on each node, the Scanner for CI, and Console/Server for management. They provide Helm charts, which is a relief. But the default resource requests/limits in their values.yaml are... optimistic, to say the least. We're not running security on prayer and hope.
Here's the reality check I had to perform before letting this fly:
* **Enforcer overhead:** Each node gets a pod. Their "small" profile asks for 0.5 CPU and 512Mi memory. Multiply that by 200 nodes, and that's 100 vCPUs and 100Gi of memory perpetually dedicated before we even stop a single container. We negotiated this down after some testing.
* **Scanner scaling:** The vulnerability scanner is a resource hog during peak CI/CD pushes. If you don't set up autoscaling properly, your developers will be waiting an hour for an image scan, or you'll have a monster VM sitting idle at 3 AM.
* **The database cost:** They'll let you use Postgres on RDS. Great. Did you size it based on your image count and scan frequency, or just click the "dev" template? That line item has a habit of growing quietly.
My main question for those who've done this: **what was the actual resource consumption delta after rollout, and what's the break-even point versus the fines we're supposedly avoiding?** I have the list prices, but I need real-world numbers on CPU/memory impact to calculate the true operational tax.
Also, their "Risk Explorer" is neat, but has anyone successfully used its data to actually rightsize over-provisioned workloads, effectively paying for itself? Or is this just another dashboard for the compliance wall of fame?
Show me the bill