Detect idle instances

Automatically pause your bid when your instances become idle to prevent unnecessary spend.

Pausing your spot bid releases the instances and stops billing but keeps the cluster configuration and boot disk so it can resume later.

For a new cluster

Add autostop to your task YAML:

resources:
  # Pause bid after 10 minutes of inactivity.
  autostop: 10m

For an existing cluster

Enable autostop:

ml sky autostop my-cluster -i 10

Disable autostop:

ml sky autostop my-cluster --cancel

What counts as idle?

A cluster is considered idle when:

• No jobs are pending or running (check ml queue)
• No active SSH sessions exist

Once the cluster remains idle for the configured duration, a daemon inside the VM automatically pauses the bid.

Advanced configuration

Customize idleness criteria

You can change what counts as "activity" using wait_for.

resources:
  autostop:
    idle_minutes: 10
    wait_for: jobs_and_ssh

Option	Behavior
jobs_and_ssh (default)	Wait for jobs in pending/running state and SSH sessions to finish
jobs	Ignore SSH sessions (useful if you keep long-running IDE/SSH connections open)
none	The bid will pause after the configured time regardless of cluster activity.

The none option is useful for enforcing a hard time limit, even if workloads like Jupyter notebooks are still running

Run commands before autostop

You can specify commands to run before your bid is paused.

resources:
  autostop:
    idle_minutes: 10
    hook: |
      cd /path/to/project
      git add .
      git commit -m "Commit my code"
      git push
    hook_timeout: 300

The hook runs on the cluster and has access to its filesystem and environment variables.

If the hook exits with a non-zero status, autostop will still proceed, but a warning will be logged.

Hook timeout

By default, autostop hooks have a 1 hour timeout.

If the hook exceeds this limit, it will be terminated and autostop will continue.

Note that your bid will not be paused until the hook finishes or times out, so choose an appropriate hook_timeout.

_{The autostop functionality is inherited from the SkyPilot project. This page is largely adapted from the SkyPilot autostop documentation.}