I think it’s not so much engineers actually setting up a distributed compute, as it is dropping a credit card into a paid cloud service, which behind the scenes sets up a distributed compute cluster and bills you for the compute in an obfuscated way, then gives a 20% discount + SSO if you sign up for annual enterprise plan.

This kind of practice is insidious because early on, they charge $20/month to get started on the first 100mb of log ingestion, and you can have it up and running in 30 seconds with a credit card. Who would turn that down?

Revisit that set up 2 years later and it’s turned into a 60k/y behemoth that no one can unwind