[esoterae]

This seems relatively well written, but I consider the cost analysis worse than a dead fish handshake. It's just plain facile to explain in one sentence that it took two years of development to bring an internal tool into service, and then in another suggest that it is cost effective without any kind of rational assignment of figures; as well without comparison of the same environment without the tool.

[thiry]

I see your point. The problem with exact numbers is that they are hardly (publicly) available as on the one side, there is the cost of building and running the platform, and on the other, there is potentially lost productivity (which is generally hard to measure). So, for the 2-year development example, I could only rely on the KubeCon talk, and it just mentions costs briefly (saying that it was cheaper for dev teams to use the platform).

Another problem is that it can be very different depending on your situation: If you are currently working with local clusters that are free to use, the direct cost benefits will be much lower than if you use individual clusters for each developer, which are quite expensive even for small teams.

So, I just wanted to give a rough overview of what that drives cost and where you potentially could save money.