The VMware Exodus
With Broadcom's acquisition of VMware causing massive licensing fee hikes, enterprise companies are scrambling for alternatives. The default reaction is often a lift-and-shift to AWS or Azure. However, this often replaces licensing bloat with compute bloat.
In this tear-down, I dissect how I re-architected a high-traffic SaaS from a heavy AWS EC2/EKS environment to a bare-metal Proxmox LXC cluster, resulting in a 70% reduction in monthly cloud costs while increasing I/O performance.
The Problem: AWS Compute Bloat
The client was running a microservices architecture on AWS. They utilized EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) for orchestration, RDS for their PostgreSQL databases, and Elasticache for Redis. The monthly bill was nearing $12,000, primarily driven by compute instances (EC2), NAT Gateway data transfer, and managed service premiums.
