[Cidan]

We've accomplished much of the same by using GKE and making artifacts out of containers. New instances scale up within a few seconds (and less than a second if we pre-pull the image).

It's pretty amazing.

[brianwawok]

Came here to say exactly this. Sadly kube isn't great for highly dynamic loads as you need a bit of time to spin up more nodes.

I would just run docker images over custom images. Spin up even faster and a bit easier to build.