[gravypod]

What benift does that distinction give you? If the cluster scales to be able to run all of your pending pods, and scales down when you have extra room, and you scale your pods correctly (preemptively & with custom metrics), what do you gain?

[ssk2]

Mostly time. For workloads that are pseudo interactive (e.g. continuous integration), you're saving developers a 10-20 minutes here or there. That can add up to be quite a bit for a medium to large organisation.