What is the purpose of the "auto-suspend" feature in Snowflake virtual warehouses?

The auto-suspend feature is a cost-management tool in Snowflake. It automatically suspends a virtual warehouse (i.e., shuts down its compute resources) if it remains idle for a specified period. This stops credit consumption for the warehouse until it is needed again, at which point it resumes automatically when a new query is submitted. This ensures that you only pay for compute resources when they are actively being used.

A. Automatically increasing the warehouse size is known as resizing, which is a manual or programmatic action, not auto-suspend.

C. Automatically adding more nodes (clusters) is a feature of multi-cluster warehouses called auto-scaling, not auto-suspend.

D. Automatically reducing the number of clusters is part of the auto-scaling feature for multi-cluster warehouses.

1. Snowflake Documentation. (n.d.). Virtual Warehouse Considerations. In "Working with Warehouses". Retrieved from https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/warehouses-considerations. See section "Warehouse Suspension and Resumption".

2. Snowflake Documentation. (n.d.). CREATE WAREHOUSE. In "SQL Command Reference". Retrieved from https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/sql/create-warehouse. See description for the AUTOSUSPEND parameter.