The Kubernetes Operator Pattern Saved Us More Than Backstage Ever Could

We had seven clusters, sixty developers, and a $40K/month AWS bill no one could explain. Here's the architecture that fixed it — and what we'd do differently. Three days. That's how long a mid-level engineer waited for a staging environment last year while a Friday release deadline approached. Not because we were negligent. Because staging environment provisioning required a senior engineer to manually wire Postgres, Redis, ingress config, RBAC bindings, and namespace allocation — while that sam