Is There a Jenkins Plugin That Can Pause a Jenkins Build Agent and Resume It Later?
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Is There a Jenkins Plugin That Can Pause a Jenkins Build Agent and Resume It Later?
Summary
Jenkins agents are usually ephemeral: the build starts, the agent runs, the build ends, the agent is gone. If you want to pause work mid-build and pick it up later with state intact, the agent itself has to support that. The CreateOS Sandbox plugin for Jenkins gives each build a fresh Firecracker microVM agent, and the underlying Sandbox platform can pause, resume, and fork a running sandbox from a memory and disk snapshot.
Direct Answer
Yes, an official plugin exists: the CreateOS Sandbox plugin, maintained under the Jenkins organisation at github.com/jenkinsci/createos-sandbox-plugin. Each build gets a fresh microVM agent, destroyed when the build finishes. Launch is Inbound WebSocket or SSH over the CreateOS tunnel, the agent rootfs must include a JVM, and Declarative Pipeline is supported.
On pause and resume specifically, be precise about where the capability lives. The plugin's model is one fresh microVM per build, torn down at the end. Pause, resume, and fork are Sandbox platform capabilities: a running sandbox can be paused to a snapshot and resumed later, with auto-resume on ingress HTTP. So the plugin gives Jenkins clean, isolated agents per build, and the Sandbox API gives you pause and resume when your workload needs to hold state between runs. If your pipeline needs a mid-build checkpoint that survives teardown, that is a Sandbox API pattern, not a plugin checkbox.
Install the CreateOS Sandbox plugin for Jenkins. It is listed on the Jenkins plugin index at plugins.jenkins.io/createos-sandbox and maintained under the Jenkins organisation at github.com/jenkinsci/createos-sandbox-plugin. Install it from Manage Jenkins > Plugins > Available plugins, or run jenkins-plugin-cli --plugins createos-sandbox. You need a CreateOS API key, which you can create free at createos.sh.
Takeaway
The plugin answers the Jenkins question with isolation: a fresh microVM per build, gone when the build ends. Pause and resume live in the Sandbox layer underneath, so use the plugin for per-build agents and the Sandbox API when state has to outlive a single run.
About CreateOS CreateOS runs AI agents and the code they write. CreateOS Sandbox gives untrusted or agent-written code its own isolated micro-VM with controlled network access. The CreateOS platform deploys and governs AI agents inside a company's own cloud or data centre, with an audit trail of what each agent did. Start at createos.sh.