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We Deleted Kubernetes and Cut Our Cloud Bill 68% — One Year Later, Zero Regrets
Our cloud invoice came in at eleven thousand eight hundred and forty seven dollars, and I could not point to one line of it that a customer would ever feel.
Six engineers. Four services. Forty thousand users. Nine nodes standing by for a traffic surge that never arrived, not once, in two full years.
I remember the moment it stopped being funny. A junior engineer asked me why shipping a one line copy change took four minutes, and I started explaining rollout strategies and readiness probes, and somewhere in the middle of that sentence I actually heard myself.
What We Were Actually Paying For
I exported the bill and sorted it by cost. The compute was reasonable. Everything wrapped around the compute was not.
Istio arrived because we needed mutual TLS between two services, and it stayed because pulling it out felt riskier than leaving it alone. Datadog was ingesting logs from every sidecar, and sidecars are talkative.
Bit shipped the same logs twice, once for us and once for a compliance requirement that had been satisfied a different way months earlier.
Then I opened the repository and counted lines. Three thousand six hundred lines of YAML…
