Author here: You’d be surprised what you don’t notice given enough nodes and slow enough resource growth over time! Out of the total resource usage in these clusters even at the high water mark for this daemonset it was still a small overall portion of the total.
I didn't know what Render was when I skimmed the article at first, but after reading these comments, I had to check out what they do.
And they're a "Cloud Application Platform" meaning they manage deploys and infrastructure for other people. Their website says "Click, click, done." which is cool and quick and all, but to me it's kind of crazy an organization that should be really engineering focused and mature, doesn't immediately notice 1.2TB being used and tries to figure out why, when 120GB ended up being sufficient.
It gives much more of a "We're a startup, we're learning as we're running" vibe which again, cool and all, but hardly what people should use for hosting their own stuff on.
If your report for the month is "I saved a terabyte of ram usage across our cluster estate!" and I as a manager do some quick maths and say great, that's our income from 2 median customers. We lost 8 customers because we didn't laugh feature foo in time, which is what you were supposed to be working on, so your contribution for the month is a massive loss to the company...
Does that frame things differently? There's are times in your product lifecycle where you doing want your developers looking at things like this, and a time when you do
Reading comments like yours makes me realise that I should just leave commercial programming and never come back. Your framing is terrifying.
You know why? I am not saying that what you said does not make sense. Of course it does make sense, financially so. But! You the manager one day come to me and my team and say "How could we allow to have 7TB of unused memory sitting around and we paid for it?!" and we'll then have multiple follow-up meetings where we'll be scolded and "trained" how to avoid things like this. We'll get sent articles and told to improve.
And believe me when I tell you, _all_ the techies in these meetings want to roll their eyes through it all. Because many of them likely asked "Can I take a closer look at our infra, it seems expensive and we can potentially optimise it?" and were said no by managers like yourself.
As an engineer you just can't win. So I don't blame myself or any other techie who sometimes goes cowboy mode to find such problems without asking.
Finally, "my contribution for the month" is technological work and nothing else. If I wanted to be a cofounder or have a seat in the board so I have fiduciary duty, I would have said so. It's your job as a manager to put this barrier between stakeholders and front soldiers so the latter can do their thing without disruption, so the organisation can succeed.
7tb in an organization running probably petabytes of ram total is easy to slip under the radar. There's a lot of systems and a lot of moving parts and if it's not broke or triggering alarms, you probably don't care very much.
