CI/CD Infrastructure Cost: The Budget Leak Hidden in Your Pipelines

Most engineering teams audit their production infrastructure . Fewer audit the infrastructure that builds and deploys it. GitHub Actions runner minutes, ECR image layers, artifact archives, and ephemeral test clusters sit in a different budget category from application workloads. They rarely get the same scrutiny. That is where the leak starts. This is not about what your pipelines deploy. It is about what the pipelines themselves cost. The Pipeline Tax You Never Budgeted For CI/CD infrastructur