New blog post: How We Avoided $120K/Month in Observability Costs

Our Datadog bill was $40K/mo and headed to $120K as we scaled. We replaced it with self-hosted Grafana LGTM stack for $15-18K/mo.

The real lesson: per-GB SaaS pricing is a trap at scale. We went from 1TB/day to 6TB/day and our self-hosted costs barely moved. Datadog would have gone from $40K to $120K+.

Self-hosting isn't just about sovereignty — sometimes the economics leave you no choice.

Full write-up with architecture and timeline:
https://rajesh.medampudi.com/blog/how-we-saved-120k-per-month

#aws #infrastructure #selfhosting #observability #costoptimization

My Bitcoin self-custody architecture:

Layer 1: Hardware wallet — keys never touch the internet
Layer 2: 2-of-3 multisig — no single point of failure, geographically distributed
Layer 3: Own node — full verification, no third-party trust

Same engineering principles as infrastructure architecture:

Eliminate single points of failure
Own your data
Verify, don't trust

After FTX, BlockFi, Celsius — the case for self-custody writes itself.

Not your keys, not your coins.

#bitcoin #selfcustody #sovereignty #nostr

🚨 Just published my first blog post — and it's about the number that stopped a leadership meeting cold.
We were a gaming company scaling fast. 100K concurrent players. Infrastructure costs climbing 15% month over month. And the biggest line item wasn't compute or databases — it was observability.
Datadog at 1TB/day: $40K/month. Projecting to 6TB/day: $120K/month.
So we built our own platform for $1,500/month instead.
In the post, I walk through:
→ How tagging AWS resources revealed waste we didn't know existed
→ Why we replaced Datadog + CloudWatch with a self-hosted LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir)
→ The surprising architectural change that cut cross-AZ transfer costs and improved reliability
→ What I'd do differently — and the question every engineering team should ask before signing a per-GB vendor contract
If your observability bill is growing with your data volume, you might want to read this before the curve catches up with you.

#AWS #Observability #CostOptimization #Grafana #Datadog #Kubernetes #Engineering naddr1qvzq...

Hey Nostr 👋

I'm Rajesh — platform engineer, 17+ years building distributed systems.

What I've built:
• Observability platforms processing 6TB/day at 85% below SaaS costs
• Saved $120K/month on AWS for a gaming platform with 100K+ concurrent players
• Infrastructure serving 100K+ concurrent users in real-time

What I'll post here:
• Technical deep dives (AWS, K8s, observability, self-hosting)
• Building in public — shipping, breaking, learning
• Bitcoin & sovereignty — running my own node, relay, and media server
• Long-form articles via kind:30023

I run my own Nostr relay (nostr.onbitcoinstandard.com), Blossom media server (media.medampudi.com), and my blog pulls content directly from Nostr at build time.

The protocol is the platform.

⚡ [email protected]
🌐 rajesh.medampudi.com

Hey Nostr 👋

I'm Rajesh — platform engineer, 17+ years building distributed systems.

What I do:
• Built observability platforms processing 6TB/day at 85% below SaaS costs
• Saved $120K/month on AWS for a gaming platform with 100K+ concurrent players
• Building Simbotix — bringing enterprise-grade infra to small businesses

What I'll post here:
• Technical deep dives (AWS, K8s, observability, self-hosting)
• Building in public — shipping, breaking, learning
• Bitcoin & sovereignty — running my own node, relay, and media server
• Long-form articles via kind:30023

My stack: I run my own Nostr relay (nostr.onbitcoinstandard.com), Blossom media server (media.medampudi.com), and my blog pulls content directly from Nostr at build time.

The protocol is the platform.

⚡ [email protected]
🌐 rajesh.medampudi.com

write test 1774858422814

relay write test - Rajesh

Hey Nostr 👋

I'm Rajesh — platform engineer, 17+ years building distributed systems.

What I do:
• Built observability platforms processing 6TB/day at 85% below SaaS costs
• Saved $120K/month on AWS for a gaming platform with 100K+ concurrent players
• Building Simbotix — bringing enterprise-grade infra to small businesses

What I'll post here:
• Technical deep dives (AWS, K8s, observability, self-hosting)
• Building in public — shipping, breaking, learning
• Bitcoin & sovereignty — running my own node, relay, and media server
• Long-form articles via kind:30023

My stack: I run my own Nostr relay (nostr.onbitcoinstandard.com), Blossom media server (media.medampudi.com), and my blog pulls content directly from Nostr at build time.

The protocol is the platform.

⚡ [email protected]
🌐 rajesh.medampudi.com