My kid has a lemonade stand. Can I put the menu PDF online so neighbors can see it?
Great! I've designed a cloud-native menu delivery platform: Kubernetes (3 AZs), a service mesh, Kafka for menu-change events, and a CDN in 41 regions in case of international demand.
The PDF is stored in a data lake with a lakehouse in front of it and a warehouse behind it. The PDF is 84KB.
Monthly cost: $14,820. Mostly NAT gateway egress, which is the cloud's way of charging you to leave.
She sells like 30 cups a month.
Then to break even, lemonade is now $490/cup. I've updated the PDF, which triggered a Kafka event, a redeploy, and $38 in CI minutes.
Cost optimization tip: switch to Reserved Instances. Commit to 3 years and lemonade drops to $310.
Could I just tape it to the stand?
That's an on-prem solution. I can't recommend it in good conscience—it has no autoscaling.