We had a service that compiles a dataset once per quarter. The total size is ~30gb. We were starting a container, storing it on an EFS volume, and mounting like any other disk.
Every time a pod started it would need to read this data into memory so we would get quick initial start-up time but the time to be ready for traffic still took a while.
Since we didn’t need to update it very often, we decided to just package the compiled dataset into the container and skip the EFS volume. We updated the image pull policy to ifNotPresent so it cut egress traffic pricing from EFS to zero. Now there is a cost to pull the image from ECR but that’s only if the pod is being scheduled onto a node it hasn’t been run on before. There was no noticable change in behavior or performance and we saved a bunch on cost.
Sometimes the big, dumb option is the right choice.