<p>I want to run a CronJob on my GKE in order to perform a batch operation on a daily basis. The ideal scenario would be for my cluster to scale to 0 nodes when the job is not running and to dynamically scale to 1 node and run the job on it every time the schedule is met.</p>

<p>I am first trying to achieve this by using a simple CronJob found in the <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/job/automated-tasks-with-cron-jobs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kubernetes</a> doc that only prints the current time and terminates. </p>

<p>I first created a cluster with the following command:</p>

<pre><code>gcloud container clusters create $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --enable-autoscaling \
    --min-nodes 0 --max-nodes 1 --num-nodes 1 \
    --zone $CLUSTER_ZONE
</code></pre>

<p>Then, I created a CronJob with the following description:</p>

<pre><code>apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: "1 * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox
            args:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: Never
</code></pre>

<p>The job is scheduled to run every hour and to print the current time before terminating.</p>

<p>First thing, I wanted to create the cluster with 0 nodes but setting <code>--num-nodes 0</code> results in an error. Why is it so? Note that I can manually scale down the cluster to 0 nodes after it has been created.</p>

<p>Second, if my cluster has 0 nodes, the job won't be scheduled because the cluster does not scale to 1 node automatically but instead gives the following error: </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Cannot schedule pods: no nodes available to schedule pods.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Third, if my cluster has 1 node, the job runs normally but after that, the cluster won't scale down to 0 nodes but stay with 1 node instead. I let my cluster run for two successive jobs and it did not scale down in between. I assume one hour should be long enough for the cluster to do so.</p>

<p>What am I missing?</p>

<p>EDIT: I've got it to work and detailed my solution <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49903951/node-pool-does-not-reduce-his-node-size-to-zero-although-autoscaling-is-enabled/51891485#51891485">here</a>.</p>

<p><strong>Update:</strong></p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Note: Beginning with Kubernetes version 1.7, you can specify a minimum
  size of zero for your node pool. This allows your node pool to scale
  down completely if the instances within aren't required to run your
  workloads.</p>
</blockquote>

<p><a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-autoscaler" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-autoscaler</a></p>

<hr>

<p><strong>Old answer:</strong></p>

<p>Scaling the entire cluster to 0 is not supported, because you always need at least one node for system pods:</p>

<p><a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/cluster-autoscaler#minimum_and_maximum_node_pool_size" rel="nofollow noreferrer">See docs</a></p>

<p>You could create one node pool with a small machine for system pods, and an additional node pool with a big machine where you would run your workload. This way the second node pool can scale down to 0 and you still have space to run the system pods. </p>

<p>After attempting, @xEc mentions:  <em>Also note that there are scenarios in which my node pool wouldn't scale, like if I created the pool with an initial size of 0 instead of 1.</em></p>

<p>Initial suggestion:</p>

<p>Perhaps you could run a micro VM, with cron to scale the cluster up, submit a Job (instead of CronJob), wait for it to finish and then scale it back down to 0? </p>
