Stop, restart and pause the app in App Platform | Voters

Stop, restart and pause the app in App Platform

Ivo Dimitrov

There is no way to stop, restart or pause the app. For the maintenance needs, it's something that we need all the time.

July 25, 2023

sai anudeep

Any update on this feature? This could turn out to be a blocker for us.

Ability to stop, restart and start an app should be a day 1 problem.

Adam Leviton

Sounds like this is heading in the right direction. I would like to see:

A way to stop the app from being billed but can also be either easily started again or recreated. This would prevent me from constantly having to manually create a staging app every time I want to test something. Droplet snapshots work OK for this case.
A way to automatically restart the app if memory, etc. exceeds a certain threshold or a certain condition occurs. Maybe even scheduled reboots?

Jim Johnston

If I'm using an app for testing, I don't want to pay for resources when I'm not using it, currently the only option is to destroy the app and reconfigure a new one when it comes to testing again, not a fun experience. This would be a great feature, thanks!

Also if I deploy something which is causing some bad side effect (such as an infinite loop to a database) I'd like to stop the component, rather than destroying it.

Bikram Gupta

Ivo Dimitrov Zeta King Derek Marler Ross Shawn McHenry Soheil Saheb-Jamii Kyle Schmolze Roman Sentsov Max Carlson bemo Yoan Ian Manuel Alves Manuel Calum Knott

Thank you for your feedback. Tagging some of you who commented in the last 4 months. For context, I am the PM for App Platform.

I wanted to confirm the use case behind each of the features. Appreciate your feedback and any additional details you can provide.

Pause: Pause the network access (for end users) for the app. App is still live for troubleshooting etc. Billing continues.
Stop the app: Delete the live app, but not the app configuration (appspec) and associated databases. Need it for stopping the app when you do not need it, but want to be able to use it later without rebuilding. Billing happens for the database, and a reduced fee (images, maintenance resources).
Restart the app: Restart the network access for a paused app. Restart the app container(s) for a live app. Recreate the stopped/deleted app.

Shawn McHenry

Bikram Gupta Those use cases match what I'd be looking for in the feature.

Ben

Bikram Gupta

Stop the App: I think the codebase (not sure if this is part of the mentioned appspec) should also remain and not be removed/cleared. Otherwise, a "start" after a "stop" might retrieve the codebase again, but maybe in a different state than the administrator is directly aware of.
Pause: just the wording is a bit confusing - perhaps call it somewhere like "disconnect" or "isolate"... I'd expect the app is in a "frozen" state with this wording. Very useful feature however!

Bikram Gupta

Hi, thank you for your patience. We now have the archive/restore feature (equivalent to stop/start) available (10/21/2024) in closed beta. If you haven't already received an email about this, I'd be happy to enable it for you. Please DM me at bgupta@digitalocean.com with your DigitalOcean account email ID.
Configuration is fairly simple via appspec. For example:
name: sample-golang
maintenance:
archive: true
Maintenance mode will be coming soon.

Bikram Gupta

sai anudeep Adam Leviton FYI above.

Zeta King

what about this feature? is very important, and please make restart and pausa recallable via API or something like so ..

Zeta King

what about this feature? is very important, and please make restart and pausa recallable via API or something like so ..

Derek Marler

I had an app stuck in a connection loop and while I could perhaps look up the process to close, being able to just restart the server would have been preferred.

So please, this!

Ross

Crucial feature, this is a huge pain to work around

Shawn McHenry

This is basically a requirement when developing on App-platform and needing to spin down an instance when not being used. I dont care if I still get billed, I want to disable traffic.

Soheil Saheb-Jamii

Okay, i'm new on digitalocean, I bought a host but i see there is no pause button, i'm moving out to heroku, sorry but i don't get how you didn't get the idea to implement this crucial feature.

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