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Compute Instance State Management

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Risk Level: Medium (should be achieved)
Rule ID: MachineLearning-015

Ensure that automatic idle shutdown is enabled for your Azure Machine Learning compute instances. This prevents billing for idle compute resources, ensuring maximum efficiency and significant cost savings.

Cost
optimisation

By preemptively terminating compute instances that have remained unused for a specified duration, the idle shutdown feature drastically reduces costs on idle, non-productive compute time, therefore eliminating unnecessary billing cycles and minimizing overall operational costs.

If prompt flow runtimes are configured on your compute instances, idle shutdown will not occur.


Audit

To determine if automatic idle shutdown is enabled for your Azure Machine Learning compute instances, perform the following operations:

Using Azure Console

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Azure Portal.

  2. Navigate to All resources blade available at https://portal.azure.com/#browse/all to access all your Microsoft Azure cloud resources.

  3. Choose the Azure subscription that you want to access from the Subscription equalls all filter box and choose Apply.

  4. From the Type equals all filter box, select Type for Filter, Equals for Operator, and Azure Machine Learning workspace for Value, then choose Apply to list the Azure Machine Learning workspaces available in the selected subscription.

  5. Click on the name (link) of the Machine Learning workspace that you want to examine.

  6. In the resource navigation panel, select Overview, and choose Launch studio to open the Azure Machine Learning Studio.

  7. In the left navigation panel, under Manage, choose Compute, and select the Compute instances tab to list the compute instances provisioned for the selected Azure Machine Learning workspace.

  8. Click on the name (link) of the compute instance that you want to examine.

  9. Select the Details tab and click on the Edit button (pencil icon) available in the Schedules section.

  10. Check the Enable idle shutdown setting state to determine the idle shutdown feature status for the selected compute instance. If the Enable idle shutdown setting is disabled, automatic idle shutdown is not enabled for the selected Azure Machine Learning compute instance.

Using Azure CLI

  1. Run account list command (Windows/macOS/Linux) with custom output filters to list the IDs of the cloud subscriptions available in your Azure cloud account:

    az account list
    	--query '[*].id'
    
  2. The command output should return the requested subscription identifiers (IDs):

    [
    	"abcdabcd-1234-abcd-1234-abcdabcdabcd",
    	"abcd1234-abcd-1234-abcd-abcd1234abcd"
    ]
    
  3. Run account set command (Windows/macOS/Linux) with the ID of the Azure cloud subscription that you want to examine as the identifier parameter to set the selected subscription to be the current active subscription (the command does not produce an output):

    az account set
    	--subscription abcdabcd-1234-abcd-1234-abcdabcdabcd
    
  4. Run ml workspace list command (Windows/macOS/Linux) with custom output filters to list the name and the associated resource group for each Azure Machine Learning workspace available in the current subscription:

    az ml workspace list
    	--output table
    	--query '[*].{name:name, resourceGroup:resourceGroup}'
    
  5. The command output should return the requested Azure Machine Learning workspace identifiers:

    Name                           ResourceGroup
    ------------------------       ------------------------------
    tm-ml-project5-workspace       cloud-shell-storage-westeurope
    tm-ml-production-workspace     cloud-shell-storage-westeurope
    
  6. Run ml compute list command (Windows/macOS/Linux) with custom output filters to list the name of each compute instance provisioned for the selected Azure Machine Learning workspace:

    az ml compute list
    	--resource-group cloud-shell-storage-westeurope
    	--workspace-name tm-ml-project5-workspace
    	--output table
    	--query "[].{Name:name}"
    
  7. The command output should return the requested compute instance identifiers (names):

    Name
    ----------------------
    project5-ml-instance01
    project5-ml-instance02
    project5-ml-instance03
    
  8. Run ml compute show command (Windows/macOS/Linux) with the name of the Azure Machine Learning compute instance that you want to examine as the identifier parameter, to determine the idle shutdown feature status for the selected compute instance:

    az ml compute show
    	--name project5-ml-instance01
    	--workspace-name tm-ml-project5-workspace
    	--resource-group cloud-shell-storage-westeurope
    	--query "{idle_time_before_shutdown:idle_time_before_shutdown}"
    
  9. The command output should return the time before shutdown configured for the idle shutdown feature:

    {
    	"idle_time_before_shutdown": null
    }
    

    If the ml compute show command output returns null for the "idle_time_before_shutdown" configuration attribute, as shown in the example above, automatic idle shutdown is not enabled for the selected Azure Machine Learning compute instance.

Remediation / Resolution

To enable and configure automatic idle shutdown for your Azure Machine Learning compute instances, perform the following operations:

Enabling automatic idle shutdown for Machine Learning compute instances using the Azure Command Line Interface (Azure CLI) is not currently supported.

Using Azure Console

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Azure Portal.

  2. Navigate to All resources blade available at https://portal.azure.com/#browse/all to access all your Microsoft Azure cloud resources.

  3. Choose the Azure subscription that you want to access from the Subscription equalls all filter box and choose Apply.

  4. From the Type equals all filter box, select Type for Filter, Equals for Operator, and Azure Machine Learning workspace for Value, then choose Apply to list the Azure Machine Learning workspaces available in the selected subscription.

  5. Click on the name (link) of the Machine Learning workspace that you want to access.

  6. In the resource navigation panel, select Overview, and choose Launch studio to open the Azure Machine Learning Studio.

  7. In the left navigation panel, under Manage, choose Compute, and select the Compute instances tab to list the compute instances provisioned for the selected Azure Machine Learning workspace.

  8. Click on the name (link) of the compute instance that you want to configure.

  9. Select the Details tab and click on the Edit button (pencil icon) available in the Schedules section.

  10. Switch on the Enable idle shutdown button and use the Shutdown after ... Minutes/Hours of inactivity controls to configure the idle time before shutdown. Choose Update to apply the changes.

References

Publication date Oct 13, 2025