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Auto-shutdown for inactive dev environments—no idle GPUs

Whether you’re using cloud or on-prem compute, you may want to test your code before launching a training task or deploying a service. dstack’s dev environments make this easy by setting up a remote machine, cloning your repository, and configuring your IDE —all within a container that has GPU access.

One issue with dev environments is forgetting to stop them or closing your laptop, leaving the GPU idle and costly. With our latest update, dstack now detects inactive environments and automatically shuts them down, saving you money.

When defining a dev environment, you can now enable automatic shutdown by setting the inactivity_duration property to specify how long dstack should wait before automatically terminating an inactive environment.

type: dev-environment
# The name is optional, if not specified, generated randomly
name: vscode

python: "3.11"

ide: vscode

# Shut-down if inactive for 2 hours
inactivity_duration: 2h

resources:
  gpu: 1

A dev environment is considered inactive when you close your desktop VS Code, exit any ssh <run name> sessions, or interrup the dstack apply or dstack attach command.

If you go offline without manually stopping anything, dstack will automatically detect inactivity and shut down the environment within approximately three minutes.

If you’ve configured inactivity_duration, you can check how long a dev environment environment has been inactive using:

$ dstack ps --verbose
 NAME    BACKEND  RESOURCES       PRICE    STATUS                 SUBMITTED
 vscode  cudo     2xCPU, 8GB,     $0.0286  running                8 mins ago
                  100.0GB (disk)           (inactive for 2m 34s)

Reattaching to the environment with dstack attach resets the inactivity timer within seconds.

Overall, the new feature makes using dev environments both safer and more cost-effective. This not only helps reduce unnecessary GPU costs, but also ensures more efficient reuse of fleets by teams.

What's next?

  1. Check dev environments, tasks, services, and fleets
  2. Join Discord