Documentation
Auto-suspension

Auto-suspension

Auto-suspension is available in Cube Cloud on Starter and above (opens in a new tab) product tiers.

Cube Cloud can automatically suspend deployments when not in use to reduce resource consumption, which helps manage your spend.

Auto-suspension is useful for deployments that are not used 24/7, such as staging deployments. However, auto-suspension shall not be used for production deployments. See effects on experience for details.

Auto-suspension is not avaiable for production multi-clusters.

Auto-suspension will hibernate the deployment when no API requests are received after a period of time, and automatically resume the deployment when API requests start coming in again:

Cube Cloud auto-suspend flowchart

Development instances are auto-suspended automatically when not in use for 30 minutes, whereas production clusters can auto-suspend after no API requests were received within a configurable time period.

During auto-suspension, resources are monitored in 5 minute intervals. This means that if a deployment was suspended 4 minutes ago, and a request comes in, the deployment will resume immediately and 5 minute of CCU usage will be billed.

Effects on experience

If auto-suspension is enabled, the behavior of your Cube Cloud deployment will experience some notable changes.

When a deployment is auto-suspended:

  • Data model compilation artifacts are discarded since the API instances are de-provisioned.
  • Refresh worker is suspended, which stops pre-aggregation builds and prevents the pre-aggregations from being kept up-to-date.
  • Semantic Layer Sync is suspended, which prevents scheduled syncs from running.
  • Monitoring integrations are also suspended, which prevents the export of metrics and logs.

When a deployment is resumed from auto-suspension:

  • Data model compilation would need to be done from scratch. It applies to all tenants in case multitenancy is set up. Consequently, one or more queries served after a deployment is resumed from auto-suspension are likely to have suboptimal performance.
  • Refresh worker would need to refresh all pre-aggregations that became stale during the suspension, competing for the query queue with API instances and compromising the end-user experience.

Configuration

To enable auto-suspension, navigate to Settings → Configuration of your Cube Cloud deployment and ensure that Enable auto-suspend is turned on:

To configure how long Cube Cloud should wait before suspending the deployment, adjust Auto-suspend threshold. For best experience, it's not recommended to choose anything below 1 hour.

The deployment will temporarily become unavailable for reconfiguration; this usually takes less than a minute.

Resuming a suspended deployment

To resume a suspended deployment, send a query to Cube using the API or by navigating to the deployment in Cube Cloud.

Currently, Cube Cloud's auto-suspension feature cannot guarantee a 100% resume rate on the first query or a specific time frame for resume. While in most cases, deployment resumes within several seconds of the first query, there is still a possibility that it may take longer to resume your deployment. This can potentially lead to an error response code for the initial query.

Deployments typically resume in under 30 seconds, but can take significantly longer in certain situations depending on two major factors:

  • Data model: How many cubes and views are defined.
  • Query complexity: How complicated the queries being sent to the API are

Complex data models take more time to compile, and complex queries can cause response times to be significantly longer than usual.