Teams deploy into the pool; IT owns the metal

Every team wants its own cloud account. Every cloud account becomes a bill nobody reviews.

IT rents three bare metal servers and assigns them to a pool called engineering. Forty developers join as user: they can create containers on those servers, see the pool, and nothing more. Two senior SREs are admin and manage membership. Only the renting account can run server commands, so a developer can't reboot a host and a pool admin can't rent a fourth server on Friday afternoon.

Developers get a container in seconds, with a URL, no ticket. IT gets a fixed monthly number for three boxes, and containers that cost nothing while idle because clones share disk blocks and the kernel caches their binaries once. The hundredth dev environment doesn't appear on an invoice. The constraint is RAM and cores, visible on one page.