Why a scale-to-zero cloud migration was scrapped for an auth system

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A development team evaluated migrating their authentication service to Azure Container Apps to cut costs on an underutilized Kubernetes cluster, but ultimately abandoned the plan. The core problem was that scale-to-zero platforms only understand two states — zero instances and N instances — but the auth system's internal coordination layer requires exactly one continuously running replica. That singleton process holds a cluster leadership lease and runs critical background jobs where having zero or multiple concurrent runners causes silent failures or duplicate side effects. Forcing a minimum replica count of one onto a serverless platform would mean constantly fighting the runtime's built-in behavior during restarts, scaling events, and revision swaps. The team instead achieved cost savings by deallocating the dev cluster during off-hours and switching to a cheaper node SKU, concluding that serverless architecture suits stateless, bursty workloads but is a poor fit for services requiring a persistent, exclusive role.

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