Elastic Container Instance:Specify a compute category to create a pod

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 rules

• 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 pods:

• 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 pods.

  If you configure annotations to set the pod category to preemptible and the compute category to economy, the system reports an error. The error code is FeatureBasedConstraintConflict.

• This feature is not supported when you create Arm-based pods.

  If you schedule the pod to run on an Arm-based virtual node and set the compute category to economy in an annotation, the system reports an error. The error code is FeatureBasedConstraintConflict.

• This feature cannot be used together with the following features:

  • Specify or exclude ECS instance families

  • Specify or exclude specific generations of ECS instance families

Configuration description

You can use one of the following methods to specify vCPU and memory specifications when you create a pod:

• Specify the number of vCPUs and memory size for each container in the pod by using the limits or requests parameter. We recommend that you use the limits parameter.

• Specify the number of vCPUs and memory size for the pod by adding the annotation k8s.aliyun.com/eci-use-specs to the metadata section of the pod.

If you create a pod by specifying vCPU and memory specifications, you can further use the k8s.aliyun.com/eci-compute-category annotation to specify the compute category of the pod.

• Valid values: economy and general.

• You can specify multiple compute categories. The system selects the category for the pod based on the specified order of the compute categories.

Effective rules

After you enable the compute category feature, the actually used specifications and compute category of the pod are determined based on the following rules:

Configuration examples

• Example 1: Specify the limits parameter for each container and set the compute category to economy

  apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  metadata:
    name: test
    labels:
      app: test
  spec:
    replicas: 2
    selector:
      matchLabels:
        app: nginx
    template:
      metadata:
        name: test
        labels:
          app: nginx
          alibabacloud.com/eci: "true" 
        annotations:
          k8s.aliyun.com/eci-compute-category: "economy"  # Set the compute category to economy.
      spec:
        containers:
        - name: nginx
          image: registry.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.14.2
          ports:
          - containerPort: 80
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "500m"      # Specify 0.5 vCPU for the container named nginx.
              memory: "1024Mi"   # Specify 1 GiB of memory for the container named nginx.
        - name: busybox
          image: registry.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/busybox:1.30
          command: ["sleep"]
          args: ["999999"]
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "1000m"   # Specify 1 vCPU for the container named busybox.
              memory: "2048Mi"  # Specify 2 GiB of memory for the container named busybox.

• Example 2: Specify the limits parameter for each container and set the compute category to general,economy.

  apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  metadata:
    name: test
    labels:
      app: test
  spec:
    replicas: 2
    selector:
      matchLabels:
        app: nginx
    template:
      metadata:
        name: test
        labels:
          app: nginx
          alibabacloud.com/eci: "true" 
        annotations:
          k8s.aliyun.com/eci-compute-category: "general,economy" # Set the compute category to general,economy. The system preferentially creates a pod of the general compute category. If the creation fails, the system creates a pod of the economy compute category.
      spec:
        containers:
        - name: nginx
          image: registry.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.14.2
          ports:
          - containerPort: 80
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "2000m"      # Specify 2 vCPUs for the container named nginx.
              memory: "4096Mi"   # Specify 4 GiB of memory for the container named nginx.
        - name: busybox
          image: registry.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/busybox:1.30
          command: ["sleep"]
          args: ["999999"]
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "2000m"   # Specify 2 vCPUs for the container named busybox.
              memory: "4096Mi"  # Specify 4 GiB of memory for the container named busybox. 

• Example 3: Use the k8s.aliyun.com/eci-use-specs annotation to specify multiple vCPU and memory specifications and set the compute category to general

  apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  metadata:
    name: test
    labels:
      app: test
  spec:
    replicas: 2
    selector:
      matchLabels:
        app: nginx
    template:
      metadata:
        name: test
        labels:
          app: nginx
          alibabacloud.com/eci: "true" 
        annotations:
          k8s.aliyun.com/eci-use-specs : "2-4Gi,4-8Gi"    # Specify that the system first uses the specifications of 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of memory to create the pod. If the creation fails, the system uses the specifications of 4 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory.
          k8s.aliyun.com/eci-compute-category: "economy"  # Set the compute category to economy.
      spec:
        containers:
        - name: nginx
          image: registry.cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.14.2
          ports:
          - containerPort: 80