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Scale your AI workloads faster and more efficiently with GKE Pod snapshots Brandon Royal Senior Product Manager David Porter Staff Software Engineer When running modern AI workloads, there’s often a conflict between performance and cost. Workloads like large language models (LLMs) load massive files, and may serve thousands of AI agents that need to execute code instantly. If each component is starting “cold” with a full data-load process, all this provisioning takes time, often forcing organizations to overprovision their infrastructure just to meet scaling requirements. To solve this, we introduced Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Pod snapshots, a new feature that lets you save the running state of your workload, including CPU and GPU memory, and restore it on demand. GKE Pod snapshots reduce AI inference start-up by as much as 89%, loading 70B parameter models in just 37 seconds and 8B parameters models in just 15 seconds. This speed allows your infrastructure to scale as fast as your demand, significantly reducing the need for overprovisioning. The high cost of cold starts — resuming instead of restarting The cold start problem isn't unique to AI; it’s a challenge for any application that requires significant initialization time — from game servers to complex Java monoliths. However, the cold start problem is particularly acute in AI workloads. Inference servers must initialize, then download and load gigabytes of model weights into GPU memory — a process that can take several minutes. Further, many agentic AI workloads, including code execution and computer use tools, require isolated sandboxes for each request, and they need to be started quickly and suspended when idle. In both scenarios, startup latency degrades the user experience and prevents rapid auto-scaling during traffic spikes. Consequently, engineers often resort to overprovisioning expensive infrastructure, or building sophisticated, custom systems to quickly restore state at the application level. Scaling AI inference without the wait For generative AI, GKE Pod snapshots solves the linear scaling penalty of model loading. Typically, every new replica you add to a cluster must independently download model weights and load them into accelerator memory. For models with tens of billions of parameters, this step alone often accounts for the majority of the startup time. With Pod snapshots, you perform this initialization once to create the initial snapshot. GKE captures the fully loaded state including the CPU and GPU memory and persists it in high-throughput Cloud Storage. When the workload needs to scale up, new replicas restore directly from this state, bypassing the initialization phase entirely. In our benchmarks this approach reduced startup latency by as much as 89% for large models like llama3-70b. This speed allows platform teams to shift from expensive overprovisioning strategies to on-demand autoscaling, to help you meet service level objectives while significantly reducing idle GPU costs. Optimizing agentic workflows and sandboxes GKE Pod snapshots also provide distinct advantages for agentic workflows where agents delegate code execution and computer use to isolated sandboxes. Isolating untrusted, LLM-generated code and commands means one sandbox per user or discrete workflow. In these scenarios, both startup latency and idle sandboxes can result in significant overprovisioning and underutilization. Pod snapshots addresses both of these challenges: - To improve startup latency, a snapshot can be captured once of the initial agent sandbox environment, and later used to quickly initialize new sandboxes. - To reduce idle sandboxes, a sandbox can be suspended when idle, capturing its entire compute resources. Later it can be resumed nearly instantly when the environment is needed. This approach is showing significant success by our customers. For instance, Retake, an AI-powered photo editing platform built by Codeway, faced a significant performance bottleneck with its GPU workloads. By adopting Pod snapshots, they were able to replace a complex custom caching layer and reduce startup time to seconds. "At Retake, serving personalized models to millions of users requires a massive, unified pipeline for both fine-tuning training and real-time inference on A3 H100 GPUs. We initially engineered a complex custom caching layer for compiled artifacts, which reduced startup time to 1 minute. However, this solution added significant maintenance overhead and still limited our ability to autoscale aggressively. We resolved this by replacing that complexity with GKE Pod snapshots, slashing startup latency to just 8 seconds. By eliminating the initialization penalty, we can now dynamically spin up H100s for specific fine-tuning or inference jobs instantly and shut them down immediately after, drastically reducing idle GPU costs and simplifying our codebase." - Ahmet Furkan Çomak, Lead DevOps Engineer, Codeway Flexible configuration for any workload We designed Pod snapshots to improve startup performance and fit naturally into existing Kubernetes workflows. Adopting Pod snapshots to your workload is easy: just define a new declarative policy using Pod snapshot CRDs. The policy allows you to define which Pods to snapshot and where to store the data, and handles the end-to-end storage lifecycle and management. You can take snapshots at any stage of the workload — either at workload startup using a workload signal, or during the lifecycle of the Pod using an on-demand trigger. You can further control storage and restore behavior, setting snapshots retention for cost optimization, choosing between the default behaviour of restoring from the last taken snapshot, or specifying an explicit snapshot during a new Pod deployment. While the primary use cases for GKE Pod snapshots are AI inference and agent sandboxes, this feature is workload-agnostic. You can use it to speed up any application with a long initialization phase, such as complex Java applications, game servers, or legacy monoliths. Get started You can begin optimizing your startup latency today with GKE Pod snapshots. Check out the documentation to learn how to get started and we look forward to your feedback.
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