lean infrastructure is four decisions, read top to bottom: cut the waste, own past your break-even, observe it cheaply, don't over-staff. none of them is a technology. it's a posture — pay for what genuinely buys you something, refuse to pay for what doesn't. cut what's wasted, own what's worth owning, see everything, staff for the real load. that's the whole thing. https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/what-lean-infrastructure-means

at 6 TB of telemetry a day, self-hosted grafana LGTM ran our whole observability platform for ~$15-18K/mo. datadog at the same volume would've been ~$120K. that's 85% less, same telemetry, same scale. and it gets worse over time — per-GB pricing and compute+storage scale on different curves, so the gap widens as you grow. datadog isn't a bad tool. you're just renting a meter that bills you more every time your product succeeds. model your bill at 5x volume before you sign, not after. #observability #selfhosting #grafana https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/observability-cost-kill

aws nat gateway charges you twice for the same packet. once at $0.045/hr just to exist (~$33/mo per gateway), and again $0.045 for every gigabyte it moves. the hourly fee is visible so nobody worries about it. the per-GB fee is the one that quietly grows, because it rides on traffic you never watch — docker pulls, apt installs, s3 reads from private subnets. open cost explorer, group by usage type, look at NatGateway-Bytes. that's the number to chase. #aws #infrastructure #cloudcost #devops

at 6 TB of telemetry a day, self-hosted grafana LGTM ran our whole observability platform for ~$15-18K/mo. datadog at the same volume would've been ~$120K. an 85% cut. datadog isn't a bad tool. the problem is you're renting something you could own, on a meter that bills you more every time your product succeeds. per-GB pricing is a tax on growth. model your bill at 5x volume before you sign, not after. #observability #selfhosting #infrastructure