Starting an instance group

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Updated at May 5, 2026

Starting an instance group will automatically start all stopped VM instances within that group. You can start a single VM instance, e.g., for diagnostics, but to enable automatic recovery or scaling, you need to start the entire group.

Warning

If Yandex Cloud stops an instance group due to a block for non-payment, that instance group can only be restarted after the block is removed.

Management console

CLI

API

In the management console, open the folder containing the instance group in question.
Go to Compute Cloud.
In the left-hand panel, select Instance groups.
In the line with the instance group, click and select Start group.
In the window that opens, click Start.

If you do not have the Yandex Cloud CLI yet, install and initialize it.

The folder used by default is the one specified when creating the CLI profile. To change the default folder, use the yc config set folder-id <folder_ID> command. You can also specify a different folder for any command using --folder-name or --folder-id. If you access a resource by its name, the search will be limited to the default folder. If you access a resource by its ID, the search will be global, i.e., through all folders based on access permissions.

See the description of the CLI command for starting an instance group:
```
yc compute instance-group start --help
```

Get a list of instance groups in the default folder:

yc compute instance-group list

Result:

+----------------------+----------------------+--------+------+
|          ID          |          NAME        | STATUS | SIZE |
+----------------------+----------------------+--------+------+
| cl15b3mrkk88******** | first-instance-group | ACTIVE |    3 |
+----------------------+----------------------+--------+------+

Select ID or NAME of the group in question, e.g., first-instance-group.
Start the instance group in the default folder:
```
yc compute instance-group start first-instance-group
```
Instance Groups will initiate starting VM instances in the group. Once all instances are started, the group will get the ACTIVE status.

To start an instance group, use the start REST API method for the InstanceGroup resource or the InstanceGroupService/Start gRPC API call.

To request a list of available instance groups, use the listInstances REST API method or the InstanceGroupService/ListInstances gRPC API call.

Starting an instance group

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