From Enterprise Bloat to OSS Brilliance: A Kubernetes Cost-Cutting Story

There's a quiet kind of tech revolution happening—not in a keynote, not on a fancy landing page, but buried deep in the infrastructure setups that most teams don't think to question. It starts with a DevOps audit and ends with someone saving a boatload of cash. Literally. Here's one such story: a team saved $100,000 by doing what more teams should—asking, "Wait, why are we even using this?" ## The Setup: Standard Kubernetes, Standard Overspend This particular project kicked off with a pretty routine task—setting up Prometheus for Kubernetes monitoring. Straightforward enough. The infrastructure was mature, stable, and... oddly expensive. As the team started poking around, something stood out. Nestled in the stack was an enterprise-grade API gateway. No big traffic. No fancy routing. Just a bloated piece of middleware that looked more like a corporate relic than a critical service. The kicker? The company was about to renew that license for another $100K. That's one hundred thousand dollars over three years to handle traffic that could probably fit on a Raspberry Pi. ## The Switch: Kong OSS to the Rescue So the team did what any good infrastructure sleuth should: they swapped it out. Kong OSS, an open-source API gateway, was dropped in its place. It didn't just replicate the functionality—it actually cleaned up the setup. No more over-engineered spaghetti. Just clean, purposeful routing. Same performance. Smaller footprint. Way more maintainable. Oh, and a $100,000 line item gone. That moment of clarity turned into a habit. Now, every time they're brought in to work on DevOps or monitoring, the team peeks under the hood at the rest of the stack. And you know what? It keeps happening. Old tools nobody questions. Leftovers from past consultants. Overbuilt, underused, and way overpriced. ## Overkill By Default What's wild is how common this is. One engineer shared that their company was paying $50K a year for a tool that basically ran glorified if statements. Another said they dropped cloud costs from $100K+ to under $20K just by moving to EKS and smarter instance management. We're talking about stuff like: Legacy service meshes that aren't even routing anything anymore. Enterprise monitoring platforms where 80% of the stack overlaps with open-source tools already in use. CI/CD platforms with enterprise licensing, even though only two people push code through them. One comment summed it up perfectly: "Teams inherit tech from three architects ago and never question it." ## Not Just a Cost Issue—A Culture One Sure, money is part of it. But this story is also about how inertia quietly becomes policy. In enterprise tech, tools often outlive the reasons they were installed. That's fine—until the renewal notice hits your inbox and suddenly you're staring down a six-figure mistake. Sometimes the tool stays because someone high up signed the original contract. Sometimes it's because the cost is hidden under some vague "support" umbrella. And other times, nobody even realizes there's an alternative because "it's always been there." This is how enterprise bloat happens. Not because of bad intentions—because of inattention. ## The OSS Argument (With Caveats) Now, this isn't a rallying cry to rip out every paid tool and replace it with open source. Enterprise solutions exist for a reason—especially when you need SLAs, premium support, and peace of mind that someone will pick up the phone at 3 a.m. But too often, companies are paying for tools that don't match their actual needs. Several engineers in the thread noted that once they moved to OSS—especially for metrics—they not only saved money, but also unlocked better visibility. No more "pay-per-metric" nonsense. One company switched from a SaaS metrics platform to Prometheus + Thanos and dropped their cost-per-series by 95%. Naturally, they started tracking 50x more data. As one user put it: "Sometimes the only reason people keep things lean is because of the price." That's not a strategy. That's a shackle. ## What You Can Actually Do About It Here's the kicker: most of these savings came from simple questions. Do we actually need this? What's it really doing for us? Can something simpler do the same job? You don't need to be a Kubernetes ninja to ask these things. You just need to get curious—and maybe a little bit bold. A growing number of teams are building "stack sanity checks" into every audit, regardless of whether it's in scope. It's not about slashing budgets—it's about right-sizing the tools to the problem. And often, the hardest part isn't replacing the tool—it's navigating the internal politics of who picked it in the first place. ## Look for the Landmines There's a lesson here for every dev, ops engineer, and manager with even a little pull over infrastructure choices: treat your stack like a living thing. Revisit. Refactor. Question it. You might just find: That high-priced gateway? Replaced by something that fits in a Dockerfile. That monitoring suite with five dashboards nobody checks? Swapped for a Grafana setup you actually control. That bloated VM cluster? Moved to containers that scale because they're simple. You don't need to be a startup to think lean. Even big orgs can benefit from a little OSS-driven housecleaning. ## Final Thought: Simplicity Wins At the end of the day, this isn't just about Kubernetes or API gateways. It's about breaking the cycle of "well, it's already there" thinking. Because under the hood of many modern systems, there's a $100K time bomb ticking quietly away. And all it takes to disarm it is someone who's willing to ask, "Hey, do we actually still need this?" Sometimes the smartest move isn't building something new—it's removing what no longer serves you.