Exam Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer topic 1 question 188 discussion

runningTimeout parameter automatically shuts down workstations after a specified total running time, regardless of activity. While it provides cost control, an idleTimeout (Option C) is generally preferred for development environments because it allows developers to keep their environments running as long as they are active, and only shuts them down when truly idle. A runningTimeout could interrupt active work, potentially impacting productivity.

idleTimeout: Though this is optional in your configuration, This parameter indicates the number of seconds to wait before automatically stopping a workstation after it last received user traffic. A value of "0s" indicates that Cloud Workstations VMs created with this configuration should never time out due to idleness. Provide duration terminated by s for seconds—for example, "7200s" (2 hours). The default is "1200s" (20 minutes). runningTimeout: This indicates the number of seconds that a workstation can run until it is automatically shut down. The idleTimeout and runningTimeout fields are independent of each other. Provide duration terminated by s for seconds—for example, "54000s" (15 hours). Defaults to "43200s" (12 hours). A value of "0s" indicates that workstations using this configuration should never time out. If encryptionKey is set, it must be greater than "0s" and less than "86400s" (24 hours).

Therefore, while both idleTimeout and runningTimeout are useful for managing workstation lifecycles, using runningTimeout provides a more controlled and predictable method for cost management without potentially disrupting developer workflows due to inactivity-induced shutdowns.

I choose C Why not D? runningTimeout will shut down the workstation whether or not it's still in use, while idleTimeout will only shut down if the machine is not being used.

D. Create a Cloud Workstations private cluster. Create a workstation configuration with a runningTimeout parameter.