Skip to main content

Case Studies

A few of the many real-world examples of customers using Zombie Mode:

Sample Scenarios

Payment Processing​

A mid-market company with 5 dev clusters at AWS on AKS.

  • Without Zombie Mode: $3,600/mo
  • With nights + weekends schedule (non production only): ~$1,152/month
  • Savings: ~$2,448/month (~68%).

SaaS Software​

Midmarket horizontal B2B with 94 microservice production workloads at Azure on EKS.

  • Without Zombie Mode: $72,400/mo
  • With nights + weekends schedule (non production only): $52,128/mo
  • Savings: ~$2,448/month (~68%)

Data Analytics Platform​

A company running continuous ETL and model-training jobs on Kubernetes. They maintain 3 production clusters (24-node average) and 2 dev/test clusters. Workloads include CronJobs, Batch Jobs, and StatefulSets for Spark workers. • Without Zombie Mode: All nodes idle nights and weekends — ~$48,000/month. • With Zombie Mode (Job-aware scheduling + autoscaled node pools): Automatically drains idle nodes after last batch job completes; restarts at next schedule. ~$21,600/month. • Savings: ~$26,400/month (~55%).

E-commerce Platform​

A high-traffic retailer runs a 200-microservice environment across staging and production namespaces. Staging clusters mirror prod 1:1 for integration tests and previews. Workloads: Deployments with HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) and Ingress controllers. • Without Zombie Mode: 6 staging clusters always on — ~$96,000/month. • With Zombie Mode (namespace-level scale-to-zero): Non-prod namespaces scale to zero during off-hours, preserving PersistentVolumes and ConfigMaps. ~$38,400/month. • Savings: ~$57,600/month (~60%).

⸻

Machine Learning Ops (MLOps) Platform​

An AI startup running per-user JupyterHub instances, model training Pods, and inference Deployments. Workloads span ephemeral Pods, Jobs, and GPU node pools. • Without Zombie Mode: GPUs billed continuously — ~$84,000/month. • With Zombie Mode (GPU pool hibernation + checkpointing): Zombie Mode snapshots training state and evicts idle GPU Pods after 1 hr inactivity. ~$29,400/month. • Savings: ~$54,600/month (~65%).