I had a service that was used to do a bunch of compute at deployment time but even with the ramp up in deployment rates anticipated by the existence of the tool, we had machines that were saturated about 6 hours a month, 12 at the outside. The amount of hardware we has sitting around for this was initially equivalent to about 10% of our primary cluster, and I got it down to about 3%.

But at the end of that project I realized that all this work could have been done on a CI agent if only they had more compute on them. My little cluster was still almost the size of the build agent pool tended to be. If I could convince them to double or quadruple the instance size on the CI pipeline I could turn these machines off entirely, which would be a lower total cost at 2x and only a 30% increase at 4, especially since some builds would go faster resulting in less autoscaling.

So if one other team could also eliminate a similar service, it would be a huge win. I unfortunately did not get to finish that thought due to yet another round of layoffs.