i had a client who was burning… $10k? maybe $20k per month largely on nodes for EKS when they had no paying customers and ~zero load. (they had fully “production” sized clusters in all of their environments, and they had a slew of weird not-quite-prod environments.)
they also had some rabbitmq-on-k8s system going that fell over during small tests because they couldn’t get k8s to actually scale it. (which then convinced them they needed k8s, and bigger nodes)
The promise of cloud infrastructure is that it can scale to fit demand — start small, and grow as needed. But sometimes the truth is that it just lets people spend money more easily (:
Back in the day, it would have required a whole procedure to buy that hardware, have it set up, etc. Now you can needlessly spend $10k per month with just a few clicks!
This is one reason I like serverless. It works for a bunch of cases when you can wrap your head around it, and cost can scale linearly with your growth.
At some point, it might make sense to move off for cost reductions, but tools like GCP Cloudrun (deploy dockerized app servers that scale dramatically better than k8s) can be really nice for a small team.
they also had some rabbitmq-on-k8s system going that fell over during small tests because they couldn’t get k8s to actually scale it. (which then convinced them they needed k8s, and bigger nodes)
sigh