/skypilot

name: skypilot-multi-cloud-orchestration
description: Multi-cloud orchestration for ML workloads with automatic cost optimization. Use when you need to run training or batch jobs across multiple clouds, leverage spot instances with auto-recovery, or optimize GPU costs across providers.
version: 1.0.0
author: Orchestra Research
license: MIT
tags: [Infrastructure, Multi-Cloud, Orchestration, GPU, Cost Optimization, SkyPilot]
dependencies: [skypilot>=0.7.0]

SkyPilot Multi-Cloud Orchestration

Comprehensive guide to running ML workloads across clouds with automatic cost optimization using SkyPilot.

When to use SkyPilot

**Use SkyPilot when:**

• Running ML workloads across multiple clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)
• Need cost optimization with automatic cloud/region selection
• Running long jobs on spot instances with auto-recovery
• Managing distributed multi-node training
• Want unified interface for 20+ cloud providers
• Need to avoid vendor lock-in

**Key features:**

• **Multi-cloud**: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Lambda, RunPod, 20+ providers
• **Cost optimization**: Automatic cheapest cloud/region selection
• **Spot instances**: 3-6x cost savings with automatic recovery
• **Distributed training**: Multi-node jobs with gang scheduling
• **Managed jobs**: Auto-recovery, checkpointing, fault tolerance
• **Sky Serve**: Model serving with autoscaling

**Use alternatives instead:**

• **Modal**: For simpler serverless GPU with Python-native API
• **RunPod**: For single-cloud persistent pods
• **Kubernetes**: For existing K8s infrastructure
• **Ray**: For pure Ray-based orchestration

Quick start

Installation

pip install "skypilot[aws,gcp,azure,kubernetes]"

# Verify cloud credentials
sky check

Hello World

Create `hello.yaml`:

resources:
  accelerators: T4:1

run: |
  nvidia-smi
  echo "Hello from SkyPilot!"

Launch:

sky launch -c hello hello.yaml

# SSH to cluster
ssh hello

# Terminate
sky down hello

Core concepts

Task YAML structure

# Task name (optional)
name: my-task

# Resource requirements
resources:
  cloud: aws              # Optional: auto-select if omitted
  region: us-west-2       # Optional: auto-select if omitted
  accelerators: A100:4    # GPU type and count
  cpus: 8+                # Minimum CPUs
  memory: 32+             # Minimum memory (GB)
  use_spot: true          # Use spot instances
  disk_size: 256          # Disk size (GB)

# Number of nodes for distributed training
num_nodes: 2

# Working directory (synced to ~/sky_workdir)
workdir: .

# Setup commands (run once)
setup: |
  pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run commands
run: |
  python train.py

Key commands

| Command | Purpose | |---------|---------| | `sky launch` | Launch cluster and run task | | `sky exec` | Run task on existing cluster | | `sky status` | Show cluster status | | `sky stop` | Stop cluster (preserve state) | | `sky down` | Terminate cluster | | `sky logs` | View task logs | | `sky queue` | Show job queue | | `sky jobs launch` | Launch managed job | | `sky serve up` | Deploy serving endpoint |

GPU configuration

Available accelerators

# NVIDIA GPUs
accelerators: T4:1
accelerators: L4:1
accelerators: A10G:1
accelerators: L40S:1
accelerators: A100:4
accelerators: A100-80GB:8
accelerators: H100:8

# Cloud-specific
accelerators: V100:4         # AWS/GCP
accelerators: TPU-v4-8       # GCP TPUs

GPU fallbacks

resources:
  accelerators:
    H100: 8
    A100-80GB: 8
    A100: 8
  any_of:
    - cloud: gcp
    - cloud: aws
    - cloud: azure

Spot instances

resources:
  accelerators: A100:8
  use_spot: true
  spot_recovery: FAILOVER  # Auto-recover on preemption

Cluster management

Launch and execute

# Launch new cluster
sky launch -c mycluster task.yaml

# Run on existing cluster (skip setup)
sky exec mycluster another_task.yaml

# Interactive SSH
ssh mycluster

# Stream logs
sky logs mycluster

Autostop

resources:
  accelerators: A100:4
  autostop:
    idle_minutes: 30
    down: true  # Terminate instead of stop

# Set autostop via CLI
sky autostop mycluster -i 30 --down

Cluster status

# All clusters
sky status

# Detailed view
sky status -a

Distributed training

Multi-node setup

resources:
  accelerators: A100:8

num_nodes: 4  # 4 nodes × 8 GPUs = 32 GPUs total

setup: |
  pip install torch torchvision

run: |
  torchrun \
    --nnodes=$SKYPILOT_NUM_NODES \
    --nproc_per_node=$SKYPILOT_NUM_GPUS_PER_NODE \
    --node_rank=$SKYPILOT_NODE_RANK \
    --master_addr=$(echo "$SKYPILOT_NODE_IPS" | head -n1) \
    --master_port=12355 \
    train.py

Environment variables

| Variable | Description | |----------|-------------| | `SKYPILOT_NODE_RANK` | Node index (0 to num_nodes-1) | | `SKYPILOT_NODE_IPS` | Newline-separated IP addresses | | `SKYPILOT_NUM_NODES` | Total number of nodes | | `SKYPILOT_NUM_GPUS_PER_NODE` | GPUs per node |

Head-node-only execution

run: |
  if [ "${SKYPILOT_NODE_RANK}" == "0" ]; then
    python orchestrate.py
  fi

Managed jobs

Spot recovery

# Launch managed job with spot recovery
sky jobs launch -n my-job train.yaml

Checkpointing

name: training-job

file_mounts:
  /checkpoints:
    name: my-checkpoints
    store: s3
    mode: MOUNT

resources:
  accelerators: A100:8
  use_spot: true

run: |
  python train.py \
    --checkpoint-dir /checkpoints \
    --resume-from-latest

Job management

# List jobs
sky jobs queue

# View logs
sky jobs logs my-job

# Cancel job
sky jobs cancel my-job

File mounts and storage

Local file sync

workdir: ./my-project  # Synced to ~/sky_workdir

file_mounts:
  /data/config.yaml: ./config.yaml
  ~/.vimrc: ~/.vimrc

Cloud storage

file_mounts:
  # Mount S3 bucket
  /datasets:
    source: s3://my-bucket/datasets
    mode: MO