Comparison
On-demand pricingvsScale to zero
On-demand pricing
you pay the full hourly rate for capacity you can give back at any second, which is the most expensive way to run anything steady.
Paying the published rate per unit of time with no commitment and no interruption risk. It is the right price for genuinely unpredictable or short-lived workloads and the wrong one for a baseline that has run continuously for two years. Most cloud overspend is simply a steady-state fleet still being billed this way because nobody did the commitment exercise.
Full entry →Scale to zero
nothing is running and nothing is billed until a request arrives, and that first request waits for a container to start.
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.
Full entry →