Pause Reservation/Sandbox and release license

Feature: Pause and maintain state of a sandbox, release license into pool

Scenarios

• Concerning a sandbox as used for real person interactivity: Live Demos, Customer facing POC, Support issue replication, special case testing for Development
• A Demo Consultant reserves a sandbox for 2 weeks, performs extensive customizations unique to the specific client demo, but leaves the reservation alone for an extended period - until the day of the demo.
• A sandbox is reserved for a Customer POC, even if the customer only logs in for a few hours spread over the course of the reservation.
• A support user reserves a sandbox for ongoing troubleshooting of an issue, but is interrupted by a new incident which may take hours to address before going back to the sandbox.
• A Development user reserves a sandbox to test some integration code in a sandbox scenario. During the project, the sandbox may go unused 95% of the time while changes are made outside of the sandbox before being copied in and quickly tested.
• In all these cases, the license is consumed for the duration of the reservation, despite the sandbox going unused for a large percentage of that time

Usage

• Provide a command that is called automatically if the sandbox experiences no user activity for a configurable period of time, and available to be called manually by the user or admin.

Benefit

• When called, the RAM/CPU resources allocated to the sandbox are released back to the host
• Sandbox Licenses are released back into the pool, becoming available for other users

Challenges

• How would CloudShell know if a sandbox was inactive? Does this exist now?
• License allocation would need to be distributed to different pools carefully, to allow for more important reservation types (Customer POC) to be available even when the pool is dry for Support/Dev. I believe this functionality already exists?
• There would be a learning curve as customers discovered their real usage.

Ultimately, I believe this feature would allow CloudShell customers to better use their full license allocation. Based on some conversations I've had, we estimate that reserved sandboxes will be in use only 30% of the time. Even if I'm wrong about the actual percentage, I am confident that it's no more than 50%. Note - we are new customers, so some of this is speculative. We are also deploying our sandboxes in on-prem VMware, so I can't speak about how these use cases would apply in Azure or AWS.Thanks!