A modern lakehouse looks simple from the outside. Data lands in object storage. Apache Iceberg gives you tables, snapshots, schema evolution, time travel, and multi-engine access. Spark writes. Trino queries. Flink streams. Snowflake or Athena may read the same data. Everyone is happy. Then the lakehouse starts growing. Small files pile up. Snapshots never expire. Manifest metadata gets heavier. Delete files slow down reads. Failed jobs leave orphan files behind. Query planning becomes slower. Storage cost grows in places nobody is watching. Every engine has its own behavior, its own tuning, and its own operational gaps. This is the part that gets underestimated. Iceberg solves the table format problem. It does not magically solve lakehouse operations.…