By default, Beam is serverless, which means your applications will shut off automatically when they’re not being used.

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Configuring Keep Warm

You can control how long your containers are kept alive by using the keep_warm_seconds flag in your deployment trigger. For example, by adding a keep_warm_seconds=300 argument to an endpoint, your app will stay running for 5 minutes before shutting off: 
from beam import endpoint


# Container stays alive for 5 min before shutting down automatically
@endpoint(keep_warm_seconds=300)
def handler():
    return {}
When keep_warm_seconds is set in your deployment, it will count as billable usage.

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Setting Always-On Containers

Any running containers count towards billable usage. Take care to avoid setting min_containers unless you’re comfortable paying for usage 24/7.
You can configure the number of containers running at baseline using the min_containers field. By setting min_containers=1, 1 container will always remain running until the deployment is stopped.
If you redeploy an app that has min_containers set, make sure to explicitly stop the previous deployment versions in order to avoid running containers that you are no longer using.
from beam import endpoint, QueueDepthAutoscaler


@endpoint(
    autoscaler=QueueDepthAutoscaler(
        min_containers=1, max_containers=3, tasks_per_container=1
    ),
)
def handler():
    return {"success": "true"}

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Pre-Warming Your Container

You can pre-warm your containers by adding /warmup to the end of your deployment URL: 
curl -X POST 'https://hello-world-a4bdc39-v1.app.beam.cloud/warmup' \
     -H 'Authorization: Bearer [YOUR_TOKEN]'
When invoked, this endpoint will send a request to the container to warm-up. You can add /warmup to the end of any of your deployment APIs to warm-up your container: 
id/:stubId/warmup
/:deploymentName/warmup
/:deploymentName/latest/warmup
/:deploymentName/v:version/warmup

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Default Container Spin-down Times

After handling a request, Beam keeps containers running (“warm”) for a certain amount of time in order to quickly handle future requests. By default, these are the container “keep warm” times for each deployment type:
Deployment TypeContainer Keep Warm Duration
Endpoints/ASGI/Realtime180s
Task Queues10s
Pods600s