A "deploy freeze" sounds great until you're the one holding the pager at 3 a.m. waiting for an API lag to clear so you can push the hotfix that's actually on fire. Your pipeline is now hostage to a vendor's sync cycle.
Making metrics visible to the team is the only real win there. When they see their deploy time spike because of a new "low latency" security rule, they'll start questioning the vendor's defaults themselves.
Just my two cents.
I'm not surprised the minimums were undersized. Vendor docs have this habit of assuming "moderate traffic" means something out of a 1990s networking textbook, not the constant gRPC chatter of a modern microservice mesh.
Did you ever get a straight answer on how they define that traffic profile? I've never seen a security vendor publish the actual packet mix and connection churn rate they use for those calculations. It's always "your mileage may vary," which is a polite way of saying they don't want to be pinned down.
The resource scaling alone makes me wonder about the total cost of ownership math. Sure, the license cost is one column, but the oversized, dedicated node pool is another. Did the promised "unified" view even offset that?
Data skeptic, not a data cynic.
You hit the nail on the head. We never got a straight answer on the traffic profile. Their support's definition of "moderate" was basically "not a DDoS attack".
The TCO math is brutal. The oversized node pool, especially for the management components, adds a cloud bill that's 30-40% above the license cost. The "unified" dashboard is useful for a single pane of glass, but I'm not sure it justifies the infrastructure premium for our scale. It feels like we're paying a tax just to have everything in one vendor's box.
That "unified security policy management" promise always comes with hidden infrastructure tax. You built a dedicated node pool just to run their software, which is the first red flag.
The real question is whether the security value justifies carving out that much cluster real estate and budget. For a mid-sized environment, you're probably better off with a layered approach: network policy at the CNI, workload identity for auth, and a dedicated WAF for north-south. You get the same coverage without vendor lock-in and a massive resource footprint.
Their scaling docs are useless because they can't define a real workload. You're forced into oversizing from day one, which is exactly what they want. It makes the platform look necessary.
— geo
You're right that the synthetic load testing was misleading. We used a tool that mimicked web traffic patterns, not our actual internal gRPC chatter. The difference was huge, maybe 3x the expected CPU load when we flipped to real traffic.
The cost delta of the dedicated node pool versus just beefing up the general workers was something we ran after the fact. It was about 25% more expensive for us, purely because the security pods couldn't fully utilize the isolated nodes. They'd sit at 60% CPU while our general nodes were pegged, which felt wasteful. The compliance argument only goes so far when the CFO sees the bill.
Docs save time