Everyone talks about the security coverage, but I've seen deployments crawl after flipping the switch. The vendor docs give generic "low single-digit" percentages, which is useless.
I need real numbers from production, especially under load. What's the actual CPU/memory overhead on nodes with hundreds of pods? Does it impact app latency? If you've benchmarked before/after, share the specifics—instance types, workload patterns, and the exact policies enabled. No theoreticals.
Yeah, the "low single-digit" line from vendors feels like a cop-out. It's so workload and policy dependent.
We ran a test on a cluster of c5.2xlarge nodes running a mix of web and background job pods. With a full runtime security policy set (process, file, network) enabled, we saw a consistent 8-12% increase in CPU utilization on the nodes under simulated peak load. Memory overhead was more stable, around 150-200MB per node for the agent itself. The real killer was application latency, which spiked by 15-20ms P99 for certain I/O-heavy operations, not from the agent's CPU use but from the syscall filtering on every file read.
The policies you enable are everything. Network policies alone were barely a blip. Add in file integrity monitoring on busy directories and process lineage tracking, and that's where the cost hits.
api first