OneUptime ditched the cloud bill and rolled their own dual-site setup. Think bare metal, orchestrated with MicroK8s, booted by Tinkerbell, patched together with Ceph, Flux, and Terraform. Result? 99.993% uptime and $1.2M/year saved - 76% cheaper than even well-optimized AWS.
They run it all with just ~14 engineer-hours/month. Thanks, Talos. The cloud's still in play, but only where it helps: archival, CDN, and burst capacity.
The bigger trend? Teams with steady workloads are eyeing physical infra again. Same automation. More control. Way less money lit on fire.
