Precludes feels like the word word here. Nothing prevents you from satisfying your use case and spinning up vms before they are needed.
I wrote the student vm system for udacity, and I spun up student vms before they needed them, with some last mile loading to finalize the files they need. The student VMs were not using k8s, although a small piece of the infrastructure did.
I worried most about untrusted users working in a complex environment with the ability to harm the experience of other users, and just used GCE.
For me, boot time was < 5 minutes, so if you can predict the next five minutes of demand, you can boot those machines early. If you are wrong you will pay extra or someone will wait extra time, but still less than the full boot time. Generally it takes less than 10 seconds to access a vm with your coursework on in.
I wrote the student vm system for udacity, and I spun up student vms before they needed them, with some last mile loading to finalize the files they need. The student VMs were not using k8s, although a small piece of the infrastructure did.
I worried most about untrusted users working in a complex environment with the ability to harm the experience of other users, and just used GCE.
For me, boot time was < 5 minutes, so if you can predict the next five minutes of demand, you can boot those machines early. If you are wrong you will pay extra or someone will wait extra time, but still less than the full boot time. Generally it takes less than 10 seconds to access a vm with your coursework on in.