The PoC Environment Nobody Kills

After six months, a proof of concept (PoC) environment remains operational, despite no one remembering why it was kept alive. The PoC was created to demonstrate the feasibility of a project, but once the success was confirmed, there was no plan to decommission the environment. This is because turning off a PoC environment was never someone's responsibility, unlike building it.

The absence of a teardown plan for such environments contributes significantly to cloud waste. Non-production environments, including PoC systems, account for about 27% of total cloud infrastructure spend at the average organization. Surprisingly, these environments are idle 88% of the time, with only 20 hours of usage per week.

In one case, idle non-production environments were found to be between 87% and 99.7% of the time, and turning them into scale-to-zero mode could reduce cloud waste by nearly 95%. Developers often fail to track or shut down idle resources, and only 43% of them have real-time visibility into where cloud waste is accumulating. Leaving a development instance running continuously costs roughly 3.4 times more than if it only ran during a standard 50-hour work week.

The PoC environment is built under time pressure, with the focus being on proving a point rather than maintaining it. It becomes infrastructure with no reason to exist, and no owner to notice its absence. This structural cloud waste is prevalent, with non-production environments making up a significant portion of the total cloud infrastructure spend.

The real reason behind leaving a PoC environment running is the lack of confidence in killing it, as there's a possibility that someone might start depending on it, making its termination seem like a bigger risk than leaving it running for another billing cycle.