The honest results table is what makes this post stand out. Showing Spring Boot at 40 percent faster alongside Jenkins at parity and SonarQube slower is far more useful than a single best case number, and the explanation of why the SonarQube wrapper bypasses the cache turns a surprising result into a design lesson. The init container finding is the part I would stress to teams first: cutting JVM boot time from 3.18s to 1.88s while pod readiness stayed at 5s is a clear reminder to measure pod-to-Ready, not just process start. Curious to see the HPA scale-out study you mention, since cache fetch cost against a remote registry is where this approach will win or lose in production.