Uh, not sure how I missed that last line in your original post about this being a more real-time requirement. No, that for sure complicates things if you don't

Uh, not sure how I missed that last line in your original post about this being a more real-time requirement. No, that for sure complicates things if you don't have a "base load" you can use your dedicated compute for when your real-time workload is lower than capacity. You would need to design (or use) hybrid local / cloud scaling solution here if you want to keep your costs low. Something that can spin up some workers when your request queue grows, and kills them when it shrinks.