The Night We Moved Our CI

Neon's CI infrastructure migration from Hetzner bare-metal to AWS resulted in costs ballooning from $30k to nearly $400k monthly due to ephemeral runners, cold caching, and compliance overhead. The team reduced costs by 75% (down to $100k) through systematic optimization: re-engineering caching for ephemeral environments, right-sizing compute resources, eliminating cold starts, and separating workload classes. The final cost remained higher than the original baseline but delivered significantly improved security, compliance, and developer productivity.