Engineering, Bitcoin & First Principleshttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/mlt-observability-teardown-80k-to-15k/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/mlt-observability-teardown-80k-to-15k/Observability cost $80K/month at 1TB/day — $40K Datadog, $40K CloudWatch. A year later at 6× the data, the self-hosted LGTM stack I built still ran $15-18K. The teardown.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/bare-metal-k8s-vs-managed/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/bare-metal-k8s-vs-managed/EKS, GKE and AKS charge ~$73/cluster/month for a control plane you could run yourself for free. Here is what that money actually buys, and when you should pay it.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/infra-bill-as-product-metric/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/infra-bill-as-product-metric/Cloud cost management isn't an accounting line at month-end. Treat the bill as a product metric — cost per request, per tenant — beside latency.Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/s3-cost-optimization-playbook/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/s3-cost-optimization-playbook/S3 cost optimization, step by step: storage classes, lifecycle policies, Intelligent-Tiering, multipart cleanup, retrieval fees, and the free VPC endpoint.Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/ri-vs-savings-plans/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/ri-vs-savings-plans/A decision guide to AWS Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances — when each wins, what to actually buy, and what the December 2025 Database Savings Plans launch changes.Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/aws-nat-gateway-hidden-tax/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/aws-nat-gateway-hidden-tax/AWS NAT Gateway pricing charges you twice — to exist and to move your bytes. How to spot the cost on your bill and the fixes that cut it to near zero.Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/audit-50k-aws-bill/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/audit-50k-aws-bill/A practitioner's cloud cost optimization audit for AWS, in order: data transfer, rightsizing, commitments, storage. Where the first 20-30% hides on a $50K bill.Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/what-lean-infrastructure-means/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/what-lean-infrastructure-means/Cloud cost optimization in four decisions: cut the waste, own past your break-even, observe cheaply, and don't over-staff. The whole method, with the receipts.Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/observability-cost-kill/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/observability-cost-kill/The Datadog alternative that ran 6 TB/day of observability for ~$15-18K/mo vs Datadog's ~$120K. How the bill ballooned, what we changed, and the 85% cut.Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/building-my-own-cloud/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/building-my-own-cloud/Six dedicated servers in a German data centre, and a multi-tenant Kubernetes platform on top of them. Most of what I run my life on now lives there. This is an honest account of why I built it, what it actually costs, and the situations in which you absolutely should not do the same.Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/what-my-kids-need/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/what-my-kids-need/I have two children. They will grow up in a world where Bitcoin is part of how families save, spend, and pass on wealth. Software good enough for non-technical families to do this safely does not yet exist. So I am building it — in public, decision by decision, with the next generation as the only deadline that matters.Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/python-to-go-cold-starts/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/python-to-go-cold-starts/Python on Knative was costing me 5–7 seconds every cold start. On a small Kubernetes cluster, that latency was the difference between a usable AI agent and a broken one. So I rewrote four services in Go on three weekends. Here are the measured numbers, the unexpected wins, the unexpected pains, and when you absolutely should not do the same.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/aws-cost-optimization-complete-guide/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/aws-cost-optimization-complete-guide/Everything you need to know about reducing your AWS bill by 20-40% — from quick wins to architectural changes.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/how-we-saved-120k-per-month/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/how-we-saved-120k-per-month/Datadog was costing us $40K/month at 1 TB/day. We were growing to 6 TB. Instead of scaling the bill, we built our own platform that ran 8× cheaper at production scale.Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/hello-world/https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/hello-world/Welcome to my personal blog. Engineering deep dives, building in public, Bitcoin sovereignty, and first-principles thinking.Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT