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Graceful Termination

Cerebrium runs in a shared, multi-tenant environment. To efficiently scale, optimize compute usage, and roll out updates, the platform continuously adjusts its capacity - spinning down nodes and launching new ones as needed. During this process, workloads are seamlessly migrated to new nodes. In addition, your application has its own metric-based autoscaling criteria that dictate when instances should scale or remain active, as well as handle instance shifting during new app deployments. Therefore, in order to prevent requests from ending prematurely when we mark app instances for termination, you need to implement graceful termination.

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Understanding Instance Termination

For both application autoscaling and our own internal node scaling, we will send your application a SIGTERM signal, as a warning to the application that we are intending to shut down this instance. For Cortex applications (Cerebriums default runtime), this is handled. On custom runtimes, should you wish to gracefully shut down, you will need to catch and handle this signal. Once at least response_grace_period has elapsed, we will send your application a SIGKILL signal, terminating the instance immediately. When Cerebrium needs to terminate an contanier, we do the following:
  1. Stop routing new requests to the container.
  2. Send a SIGTERM signal to your container.
  3. Waits for response_grace_period seconds to elaspse.
  4. Sends SIGKILL if the container hasn’t stopped
Below is a chart that shows it more eloquently: If you do not handle SIGTERM in the custom runtime, Cerebrium terminates containers immediately after sending SIGTERM, which can interrupt in-flight requests and cause 502 errors.

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Implementation

For custom runtimes using FastAPI, implement the lifespan pattern to respond to SIGTERM.

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main.py

Create a new file named main.py with the following: 
from fastapi import FastAPI, HTTPException, Request
from contextlib import asynccontextmanager
import asyncio
from dataclasses import dataclass

@dataclass
class AppState:
    active_requests: int = 0
    shutting_down: bool = False
    shutdown_event: asyncio.Event = None
    lock: asyncio.Lock = None

    def __post_init__(self):
        if self.shutdown_event is None:
            self.shutdown_event = asyncio.Event()
        if self.lock is None:
            self.lock = asyncio.Lock()

@asynccontextmanager
async def lifespan(app: FastAPI):
    app.state.app_state = AppState()
    yield

    state = app.state.app_state
    state.shutting_down = True

    if state.active_requests > 0:
        try:
            await asyncio.wait_for(state.shutdown_event.wait(), timeout=30.0)
        except asyncio.TimeoutError:
            pass

app = FastAPI(lifespan=lifespan)

@app.middleware("http")
async def track_requests(request: Request, call_next):
    state: AppState = request.app.state.app_state

    async with state.lock:
        if state.shutting_down:
            raise HTTPException(status_code=503, detail="Service shutting down")
        state.active_requests += 1

    try:
        response = await call_next(request)
        return response
    finally:
        async with state.lock:
            state.active_requests -= 1
            if state.shutting_down and state.active_requests == 0:
                state.shutdown_event.set()

@app.get("/ready")
async def ready(request: Request):
    state: AppState = request.app.state.app_state

    async with state.lock:
        if state.shutting_down:
            raise HTTPException(status_code=503, detail="Not ready - shutting down")

    return {"status": "ready", "active_requests": state.active_requests}

@app.post("/hello")
def hello():
    return {"message": "Hello Cerebrium!"}

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cerebrium.toml

If you already have a cerebrium.toml file, add or update these sections. If you don’t have one, create a new file with the following: 
[cerebrium.deployment]
name = "your-app-name"
include = ["./*"]
exclude = [".*"]

[cerebrium.hardware]
cpu = 1
memory = 1.0
compute = "CPU"
gpu_count = 0
provider = "aws"
region = "us-east-1"

[cerebrium.scaling]
min_replicas = 0
max_replicas = 2
cooldown = 30
replica_concurrency = 1  # Must match max_concurrency in your AppState

[cerebrium.runtime.custom]
port = 8000
dockerfile_path = "./Dockerfile"
Key configuration notes:
  • replica_concurrency should match max_concurrency in your AppState class (if you add that field)
  • port must match the port in your Dockerfile CMD
  • Adjust hardware settings based on your application needs

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Dockerfile

Create a new file named Dockerfile with the following: 
FROM python:3.12-bookworm
COPY . .
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
EXPOSE 8000
CMD ["uvicorn", "main:app", "--host", "0.0.0.0", "--port", "8000"]

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requirements.txt

Add to your existing requirements.txt or create a new file with: 
fastapi[standard]

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Key Points

  • The /ready endpoint is essential for proper load balancing during scaling events
  • Without a proper /ready endpoint, Cerebrium uses TCP ping which only checks if the port is open, potentially routing traffic to replicas that are shutting down
  • The 30-second shutdown timeout in the lifespan function is configurable
  • All request tracking uses asyncio locks to ensure thread safety
Test SIGTERM handling locally before deploying: start your app, send SIGTERM with Ctrl+C, and verify you see graceful shutdown logs.