Also, for only two k8s devops engineers in a 24h-available world, you’re gonna be running them ragged with 12h solo shifts or taking the risk of not staffing overnight. Considering most update and backup jobs kick off at midnight, that’s a huge risk.
If I were putting together a minimum-viable staffing for a 24x7 available cluster with SLAs on RPO and RTO, I’d be recommending much more than two engineers. I’d probably be recommending closer to five: one senior engineer and one junior for the 8-4 shift, a engineer for the 4-12 shift, another engineer for the 12-8 shift, and another junior who straddles the evening and night shifts. For major outages, this still requires on-call time from all of the engineers, and additional staffing may be necessary to offset overtime hours. Given your metric of roughly $8k an engineer, we’d be looking at a cool $40K/month in labour just to approach four or five 9s of availability.
If I were putting together a minimum-viable staffing for a 24x7 available cluster with SLAs on RPO and RTO, I’d be recommending much more than two engineers. I’d probably be recommending closer to five: one senior engineer and one junior for the 8-4 shift, a engineer for the 4-12 shift, another engineer for the 12-8 shift, and another junior who straddles the evening and night shifts. For major outages, this still requires on-call time from all of the engineers, and additional staffing may be necessary to offset overtime hours. Given your metric of roughly $8k an engineer, we’d be looking at a cool $40K/month in labour just to approach four or five 9s of availability.