A few months ago, a client asked me to take care of their Kubernetes cluster (hosted on AWS and GCP). In their opinion, the costs were exorbitantly hi

From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency

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2024-07-04 09:30:05

A few months ago, a client asked me to take care of their Kubernetes cluster (hosted on AWS and GCP). In their opinion, the costs were exorbitantly high for relatively simple and lean websites. Sure, they had many visits, but nothing too excessive development-wise.

I kindly declined. Unfortunately, their situation is all too common these days: they hired developers accustomed to working that way, convinced that a system administrator is now unnecessary because “the cloud has infinite potential.” They were used to considering optimization as secondary because “we have infinite power” (and this is already a spoiler for the ending).

Being open to dialogue and new experiences, they asked for my opinion on the matter. We talked for a while, and I explained that, in my view, for the type of setup they had (standard, with various replicas and variants, but primarily based on two platforms), it didn’t make sense. I saw it as complicating things. An over-engineering of something simple. Like taking a cruise ship to cross a river.

They then asked me to create something simple that would serve as a development server and for backups, to understand what kind of solution I had in mind.