Scale-to-zero cuts cloud costs by billing only while code handles requests

Scale-to-zero changes cloud billing so that compute is charged only while an application is processing requests, not while a virtual machine merely sits running. When traffic stops, the platform pauses the instance and the compute meter drops to zero, and the next request wakes it up. In one example, about 84 percent of a customer's consumption came from a virtual machine that stayed on for every hour despite averaging under one vCPU of real work. Always-on instances accrue roughly 730 billable hours per month regardless of load, so even idle machines carry a fixed cost. The main trade-off is a short delay on the first request after an idle period, which is negligible for most APIs and internal tools but may matter for latency-critical or persistent-connection workloads.