Staging Costs More Than Production
Staging environment costs more than production. Wait, what?
The discovery:
- Production: auto-scales based on traffic
- Staging: fixed size "for consistency"
- Nobody uses staging nights/weekends
- Same instance sizes as prod "for parity"
- No auto-shutdown
The math:
- Production: scales down at night, saves 40%
- Staging: runs 24/7 at full capacity
- Usage: 8 hours/day, 5 days/week = 24% utilization
- Paying for 76% idle time
Solutions we implemented:
- Scheduled scaling: Scale to 0 from 8PM to 8AM
- Weekend shutdown completely
- Smaller instance types (don't need 16 CPU for 3 users)
- On-demand spin-up via Slack command
Result: 60% cost reduction. Zero impact on development.
Lesson: The most expensive resources are the ones nobody turns off.