CASE 26 · COVE · 2024
A preview environment per pull request, without bankrupting the team.
An education tech company wanted preview environments for every pull request — but their first attempt had spun up a full-stack copy per PR and blew the budget in two weeks. We rebuilt it as namespace-scoped previews on a single shared cluster, with on-demand databases and aggressive teardown.
Education tech
PLATFORM
2024
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
COST PER PREVIEW
$0.18/hr
SPIN-UP TIME
3m
PREVIEW SURFACE
FULL APP
TEARDOWN
AUTO
HOW IT WENT
The first attempt had been one cluster per preview, one database per preview, one CloudFront distribution per preview. Conceptually correct, financially impossible. The CFO had quietly asked the CTO to fix it or kill it.
We rebuilt it on a single shared "preview" EKS cluster, one Kubernetes namespace per PR, with name-mangled ingress hostnames terminating on a single CloudFront distribution. Database needs were served by Aurora Serverless v2 with cold-start tolerated (preview, not production). Kyverno blocked any preview from running images outside the team’s ECR.
Cost per preview-hour dropped from $4.20 to $0.18. Spin-up time landed at three minutes — fast enough that engineers actually use it. Teardown is automatic: PR closes, namespace deletes; PR sits idle for seven days, namespace deletes. The cluster runs at consistent capacity regardless of PR volume.
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