Why We Moved a Client Off Lambda: A Cold-Start Case Study (2% → 0.01% Error Rate)
TL;DR — A client’s core Lambda function was cold-starting under uneven traffic, and those cold starts were failing outright rather than just running slow — a 2% error rate that propagated into 5 downstream services. Moving the function off Lambda onto an always-on EC2 instance eliminated the cold start entirely and cut the error rate […]
Are Your AWS Lambda Functions Leaking Money? The Hidden Cost of CloudWatch REPORT Logs
TL;DR — Every AWS Lambda invocation emits a REPORT line to CloudWatch Logs. These ~200-byte lines look free, but at scale they routinely account for 20–60% of a serverless platform’s CloudWatch Logs bill — sometimes more than the Lambda compute itself. The fix is not “log less” in your code. It is tuning system-level logging, […]
How We Reduced a Client’s Cloud Bill by 98.6% Overnight: A FinOps Case Study
TL;DR — A client was spending $701/month on a full Kubernetes-based Discourse stack — for a forum with discussions disabled. By asking “do we even need a forum engine?”, we migrated the content to a static site on S3 + CloudFront and cut the bill to ~$10/month: a 98.6% reduction overnight. The biggest FinOps wins […]
