As a data point, on a busy GKE production cluster with 12 highcpu-16 nodes we have kube-system pods taking a total of ~700mCPU on all servers combined. I'm not

As a data point, on a busy GKE production cluster with 12 highcpu-16 nodes we have kube-system pods taking a total of ~700mCPU on all servers combined. I'm not sure how the CPU usage scales, but probably not linearly. Most of the CPU usage is kube-dns, which I think requires much less CPU if you make few internal network connections.