Cold-starts on GKE waste time and money by pulling images at the worst moment. I’ll demo a pluggable FastAPI background service that discovers top app versions, resolves base images, and drives a DaemonSet with per-image init containers to pre-warm every node—fully async, cache-aware, RBAC-scoped, and toleration-ready. Designed for today’s GKE stack, it plays nicely with Gateway API, KEDA (event-driven scale), and Cilium/eBPF dataplanes, and can complement OCI lazy-pull strategies. The result: noticeably faster pod startups, fewer burst-time failures, and leaner capacity planning.