Elastic Container Instance (ECI) provides a serverless container runtime — no infrastructure to manage, no cluster to maintain, and billing down to the second.
Core benefits
Zero O&M
ECI runs on a serverless architecture with fully hosted infrastructure. Provide a container image and ECI handles the rest: capacity planning, node management, and cluster operations are all managed for you. Your team focuses on application development, not servers.
Flexible deployment
ECI draws from Alibaba Cloud's global computing infrastructure as a shared resource pool, giving you access to CPUs, vGPUs, and resources with high clock speeds on demand. All resource types support large numbers of concurrent workloads and are available to you at any time.
Cost-effectiveness
ECI bills based on the resources consumed, measured in seconds from instance start to stop. Combine ECI with Kubernetes or a self-managed scheduling system to enable auto scaling based on traffic — reducing the costs caused by idle resources.
High elasticity
Instances start in seconds. Scale up to handle traffic bursts of up to hundreds of times without pre-allocating cluster capacity or planning for business traffic. ECI absorbs demand spikes without requiring you to plan ahead.
Compatibility
ECI is fully compatible with Kubernetes. Schedule pods directly from a Kubernetes cluster to ECI, or connect ECI to an existing Kubernetes cluster — whether running on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) or on-premises — using Virtual Kubelet. ECI is also integrated with Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK).
Integration
ECI integrates automatically with Alibaba Cloud services to support network access, log collection, data persistence, and service monitoring. Integrated services include Simple Log Service, File Storage NAS (NAS), and Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS).
Comparison
A container group is the basic execution unit of ECI and is fully compatible with Kubernetes pods. The table below compares ECI against ECS and ECS Bare Metal Instance across key operational dimensions.
| Dimension | Elastic Container Instance | ECS | ECS Bare Metal Instance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billable item | Pods only | All ECS resources | All ECS Bare Metal Instance resources |
| O&M | No node management required; lower operational overhead | Node management and resource O&M required | Node management and resource O&M required |
| Performance | Low virtualization loss; instances start in seconds; no reserved resources needed | Low virtualization loss | No virtualization loss |
| Elasticity | Highest — lower-spec instances with greater inventory availability | High | Modest |
| Security | Strong isolation between pods | Strong isolation between instances; weak isolation between pods | Strong isolation between instances; weak isolation between pods |
| Risk of computer crash | Extremely low — failures are limited to individual pods with minimal business impact | Extremely low — a single instance and all pods on it are affected | Extremely low — a single instance and all pods on it are affected |