[thwayunion]

> Why would you scale to zero in high perf compute?

Midnight - 6am is six hours. The on demand price for a G5 is $1/hr. That's over $2K/yr, or "an extra week of skiing paid for by your B2B side project that almost never has customers from ~9pm west coat to ~6am east coast". And I'm not even counting weekends.

But that's sort of a silly edge case (albeit probably a real one for lots of folks commenting here). The real savings are in predictable startup times for bursty work loads. Fast and low variance startup times unlock a huge amount of savings. Without both speed and predictability, you have to plan to fail and over-allocate. Which can get really expensive fast.

Another way to think about this is that zero isn't special. It's just a special case of the more general scenario where customer demand exceeds current allocation. The larger your customer base, and the burstier your demand, the more instances you need sitting on ice to meet customers' UX requirements. This is particularly true when you're growing fast and most of your customers are new; you really want a good customer experience every single time.