Zero-Idle

A system architecture property in which infrastructure costs approach zero when the system receives no traffic. Compute and storage are provisioned on-demand and billed per-request rather than per unit of time, so an idle system incurs no standing cost.

Zero-idle is the primary cost constraint governing Prosyon system design. Every architectural choice is evaluated against whether the system can reach $0 at idle — where “idle” means no incoming traffic and no scheduled work.

The practical implication is a preference for pay-per-request primitives (Lambda, DynamoDB on-demand, CloudFront, S3) over always-on resources (EC2, RDS, NAT Gateways). A zero-idle system may still have a small storage cost at rest, but compute and transfer costs trend to zero.

architecture cost-optimization serverless zero-idle

Referenced in

WP-002 A Single-Table DynamoDB Model draft
WP-001 Static Delivery for a Zero-Idle Research Site published