Observability pipeline on S3 alone cuts costs by 87%

A developer replaced a Kafka+Flink+OTel ingestion pipeline costing $700-800/month with a single binary using S3 for storage, write-ahead log, and Iceberg catalog, at $100/month. The design eliminates local disks and coordination services, relying on S3's fault tolerance and scalability. It targets observability workloads where sequential writes and analytical reads tolerate S3's latency trade-offs.