From 4 weeks to 1 day. Here’s how we cut infrastructure delivery costs by 90%.

Recently, we’ve been working with one of our customers on something that many IT teams quietly struggle with — standing up a new landing zone from scratch.

The setup was fairly typical: 14 VMs, a full stack of services (Active Directory, firewalls, NPM, SCCM, SMTP, AVD, a Kubernetes cluster for apps, and more). Nothing exotic. Just the kind of work that keeps a technical team fully occupied for 4 weeks — with a network engineer alone spending an entire week on manual firewall configuration.

Total engineer engagement cost? ~6,000 EUR. Cost per VM? ~428 EUR. And the worst part — none of that effort compounds. The next landing zone? Same 4 weeks. Same cost. From scratch.

That’s what we call a one-time labour trap.

We introduced an Infrastructure as Code + Configuration as Code approach, built around DevOps delivery processes. The same 14-VM environment — VMs, services, firewall rules, Kubernetes, all of it — can now be delivered in under 2 days.

The first implementation takes more effort upfront to build the right procedures and templates. But once it’s done, every subsequent deployment is just customization. Servers, cloud objects, firewall rules — all managed from a single, version-controlled codebase.

The numbers after the change speak for themselves:

• ⏱️ Time to deliver: 4 weeks → 1–2 days
• 💶 Cost per VM: 428 EUR → ~40 EUR
• ♻️ Replicability: zero → fully repeatable

And we’re not stopping there — self-service automation tooling can push that cost even lower, while also covering server modifications and decommissioning down the line.

Infrastructure work doesn’t have to be a black hole for engineering time. If your team is rebuilding the same environments over and over manually, that’s not a resource problem — it’s a process problem.

Happy to talk through how IaC/CaC delivery could work for your environment. 👇

#DevOps #InfrastructureAsCode #Automation #CloudInfrastructure #IaC #ITDelivery #DigitalTransformation