Elastic Container Instance:Specify a compute category to create an elastic container instance

Description of the compute category feature

To better meet your requirements for low cost or stable performance, Elastic Container Instance provides the compute category feature. When you create an elastic container instance by specifying vCPU and memory specifications, Elastic Container Instance selects an underlying architecture based on the economy and general compute categories. You can configure a compute category based on your requirements. The system automatically selects an underlying architecture that matches the vCPU and memory specifications.

• Economy compute category

  The economy compute category supports instances that have 0.25 to 8 vCPUs. The unit price of instances of the economy compute category is lower than the unit price of instances of the general compute category.

• General compute category

  The general compute category supports instances that have 1 to 64 vCPUs. The specification unit prices of instances of the general compute category are the same as the specification unit prices of instances that are created without the compute category feature enabled. Instances of the general compute category provide higher performance than instances with the same vCPU and memory specifications that are created without the compute category feature enabled.

How to select a compute category

You can select a compute category based on your specific preferences for low cost, stable performance, or high availability. We recommend that you select a compute category based on the following rules:

• If you want to use the elastic container instance in simple applications, you can select the economy compute category to reduce resource costs.

• If you want the elastic container instance to provide high performance, you can select the general compute category.

• If your business can tolerate certain performance fluctuations, you can specify multiple compute categories to prevent instance creation failure due to insufficient resources and ensure high availability.

Description of the compute categories

This section describes the economy and general compute categories supported by Elastic Container Instance.

Billing

• Economy compute category

  Compared with instances that are created without the compute category feature enabled, instances of the economy compute category are entitled to the same memory unit price and a lower vCPU unit price.

  • Unit price of vCPUs: USD 0.00000424 per vCPU-second (USD 0.015264 per vCPU-hour)

  • Unit price of the memory: USD 0.00000096 per GiB-second (USD 0.003456 per GiB-hour)

• General compute category

  The specification unit prices of instances of the general compute category are the same as the specification unit prices of elastic container instances that are created without the compute category feature enabled.

  • Unit price of vCPUs (number of vCPUs): USD 0.0000077/second (USD 0.02772/hour)

  • Unit price of memory (GiB): USD 0.00000096/second (USD 0.003456/hour)

Limits

The following limits apply if you specify a compute category when you create elastic container instances:

• This feature is valid only when you create elastic container instances by specifying vCPU and memory specifications.

  If you specify ECS instance types when you create elastic container instances, the ECS instance types take precedence. In this case, you cannot specify a compute category.

• This feature is not supported when you create preemptible elastic container instances.

  If you set the instance category to preemptible and specify a compute category, the system reports an error. The error code is FeatureBasedConstraintConflict.

• This feature is not supported when you create Arm-based elastic container instances.

  If you set the CPU architecture of the instance to Arm and specify a compute category, the system reports an error. The error code is FeatureBasedConstraintConflict.

Configuration description

When you call the CreateContainerGroup API operation to create an elastic container instance, you can use the ComputeCategory parameter to specify the compute category of the instance in addition to specifying the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance.

You can use one of the following methods to specify the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance:

• Method 1: Specify vCPU and memory specifications only at the container level. The system automatically adds up the numbers of vCPUs and the memory sizes of all containers to obtain the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance.

• Method 2: Specify the vCPU and memory specifications at the instance level and configure the vCPU and memory specifications at the container level based on your requirements.

• Method 3: Specify the vCPU and memory specifications at the instance level by using the InstanceType parameter.

The following table describes the parameters that you can use to specify the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance. For more information, see CreateContainerGroup.

Implementation rules

After you enable the compute category feature, the specifications and compute category of the elastic container instance are determined based on the following rules:

Sample configurations

• Example 1: Specify the vCPU and memory specifications of each container and set the compute category to economy.

  ContainerGroupName=test-category
  # Set the compute category to economy.
  ComputeCategory.1=economy
  # Specify the vCPU and memory specifications of each container
  Container.1.Cpu=1.0
  Container.1.Memory=2.0
  Container.1.Name=nginx
  Container.1.Image=registry-vpc.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.14.2

• Example 2: Specify the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance and set the compute categories to general and economy in sequence.

  ContainerGroupName=test-category
  # Specify the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance.
  Cpu=4.0
  Memory=8.0
  # Set the compute categories to general and economy in sequence.
  ComputeCategory.1=general
  ComputeCategory.2=economy
  # Configure the containers.
  Container.1.Name=nginx
  Container.1.Image=registry-vpc.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.14.2

• Example 3: Specify multiple vCPU and memory specifications for the instance and set the compute category to general.

  ContainerGroupName=test-category
  # Specify multiple vCPU and memory specifications for the instance.
  InstanceType=2-4Gi,4-8Gi
  # Set the compute category to general.
  ComputeCategory.1=general
  # Configure the containers.
  Container.1.Name=nginx
  Container.1.Image=registry-vpc.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.14.2