Platform & DevOps·Placement, resources and the pod lifecycle
nothing is running and nothing is billed until a request arrives, and that first request waits for a container to start.
Scale to zero
Also calledscale-to-zero, zero-scale, serverless containers
Allowing a workload's replica count to reach zero when idle, with something in front holding the first request while capacity comes back. It is the strongest cost lever available for spiky and internal workloads, and it moves the whole cost of a cold start onto whoever is unlucky enough to be first. It is a poor fit for anything with a latency objective on the first request, and a good fit for review environments, batch endpoints and internal tools.