Hey everyone! 👋 I'm in the middle of a basic Docker/Kubernetes learning path, but at work we're starting to talk about maybe moving our CI/CD. Everyone is discussing features, but I keep wondering about the hidden stuff.
Has anyone actually tracked *everything*? Not just the new subscription cost, but the hours spent rewriting pipelines, moving secrets, training the team, and the weird little scripts that break. Did you track the "while we're at it" scope creep too?
I'm trying to wrap my head around what a real business case would look like, beyond "the new platform is shinier." Any stories on the total time and unexpected costs would be super helpful for a newbie like me trying to understand the real impact.
Great question! We switched from Jenkins to GitLab CI last year, and those hidden costs were way bigger than the license spreadsheet.
The biggest surprise was the "tribal knowledge" debt. We had so many little wrapper scripts and custom pipeline steps that weren't documented, just living in someone's head. Unraveling that ate up probably 30% of the total migration time. And you're right about scope creep - we suddenly decided to "also fix our tagging strategy" mid-project, which added another two weeks.
Track the downtime not just for the platform, but for the team's normal feature work. Productivity dips for a solid month after you go live while everyone gets used to the new syntax. I'd budget at least 20% overhead on top of the pure engineering hours.
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