SkyPilot can find the credentials in ~/.aws/credentials and ~/.config/gcloud in the container, similar to where the cloud credentials are located on a local machine. For state management, SkyPilot stores the state for clusters on the local machine that runs sky launch, etc., in several DBs created under the ~/.sky folder. To make it stateless, you could use a persistent volume to have persistent SkyPilot state by mounting your PV at ~/.sky/ and ~/.ssh/ in the pod. This allows invoking sky operations on the cloud from other ephemeral pods. Credentials are copied at cluster creation (sky launch).