This part is still really hard for a lot of workloads. We have some applications that have a really long startup time (5-10minutes) and also have on the whole predicable traffic patterns. It'd be great to be able to tell k8s to scale up/down based on time of day in addition to the usual metrics without having to resort to a hacky cronjob to adjust the min replicas.

Sure it won't help with a unexpected traffic spike, and it would be better if the applications could come online faster (vendor app out of our control) but most days this feature would allow us to right size the workload way easier.

There's been a few issues like https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/49931 but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere right now