How fast new worker capacity arrives

From the scale command to a worker polling for jobs, measured on GKE with the cluster autoscaler. Node provisioning and the image pull dominate the new-node path — the worker's own boot is seconds.

0

30s

60s

90s

Warm node

cluster has room,
image cached

~5 s

New node

cluster autoscaler
adds a VM

Provision node

~60 s

Pull image

~24 s

~87 s

Provision node (VM boot + join)

Pull worker image (126 MB, uncached)

Start container (image cached)

Boot worker + connect (~3 s)

Scaling on a metric through an HPA adds its reaction time (typically 15–60 s) in front of both paths. The first run on a fresh worker adds a one-time ~2–3 s cold start.