The Small Job Tax: How Spark Cold Starts Are Silently Draining Your Data Budget
· 10 min read
Most data teams obsess over optimizing their biggest, most complex Spark jobs. Meanwhile, hundreds of tiny ETL jobs — each processing a few gigabytes — quietly rack up a bill that nobody questions.
We call it the Small Job Tax: the disproportionate cost of running lightweight workloads on infrastructure designed for heavy lifting. And for many organizations, it is the single largest source of wasted compute spend.
