How we saved $5k a month with a single Grafana Query

The authors of this text were optimizing the startup time of ephemeral pods in a Kubernetes cluster, which represented compute time and platform cost. They started by looking at the chunky AWS SDK, which added 70 megabytes to the package size, but switching to the V3 AWS SDK didn't improve start times as much as expected. The authors then drilled into finding the exact source of CPU time by adding a log line to track the time it took for each pod to be ready. They found that the startup time was around 3 seconds, which seemed high, and were concerned about the experience for new users of Checkly. To fix this issue, they shifted their order of operations to optimize performance, but still had excess time to prepare the pod. The authors then monkey-patched the `require` function to find the cause of slow starts, discovered that different versions of the AWS SDK were causing delays, and changed all versions to be the same version, which reduced startup times by 300 milliseconds, resulting in significant cost savings.

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