There is a difference between waiting and waiting. For an hourly batch job that already takes 10 minutes to run, the extra time for pod scheduling and containe

There is a difference between waiting and waiting. For an hourly batch job that already takes 10 minutes to run, the extra time for pod scheduling and container downloading is negligible anyway. What you shouldn’t do is put pod scheduling in places where thousands of users per minute expect sub-second latency. In your case, if the time for starting up the EC2 becomes a bigger factor than the job itself, you can add placeholder pods that just sleep, while requiring exactly that machine config but request 0 cpus, just to make sure it stays online.