To force a maximum number of instances, you need to use: automatic_scaling -> max_instances and not: automatic_scaling -> max_idle_instances Regarding the entrypoint, something like this works well for us: entrypoint: gunicorn --bind :$PORT --workers...

Have you tried tweaking the app.yaml config values such as the gunicorn entrypoint, or the scaling concurrent requests settings, to see if these cause less instances of your app to be created?

We've noticed this same thing too.Thought it had to do with us transitioning from Python 2 to 3, but now looks like that was just a coincidence.

After doing some of our own testing, we've come to similar conclusions.Importantly, if your app is network bound (waiting on lots of RPC calls, and not maxing out the CPU), there does not seem to be a benefit to using larger instance classes with mor...