Create an Arm-based ECI instance - Elastic Container Instance

Description of the ECS instance families

Arm-based instance types are built on the Arm architecture. Each vCPU corresponds to a physical processor core. They deliver stable performance and provide exclusive resources. They are suitable for scenarios such as containers, microservices, websites and application servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and CPU-based machine learning.

Category	Arm instance family
General-purpose	g8y
Compute-optimized	c8y
Memory-optimized	r8y

For more information about ECS instance types, see the following topics:

Precautions

Arm-based ECI instances are billed by the actual Arm instance type, not by vCPU and memory.

Important

After you create an ECI instance, you can call the DescribeContainerGroups operation to query its details. The InstanceType parameter in the response indicates the actual ECS Arm instance type that the ECI instance uses.

Configuration description

API mode

When you call the CreateContainerGroup operation to create an ECI instance, you can use one of the following methods to create an Arm-based instance.

Method 1: Directly specify an ECS Arm instance type with the InstanceType parameter.
Method 2: Specify the vCPU and memory, and specify the CPU architecture with the CpuArchitecture parameter. The system automatically selects a supported ECS Arm instance type that meets the vCPU and memory requirements.

You can use one of the following methods to specify the vCPU and memory specifications:
- Specify the vCPU and memory specifications of only containers. The system automatically aggregates the vCPU and memory specifications of containers to the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance.
- Specify the vCPU and memory specifications of the instance, and then specify the vCPU and memory specifications of each container.
- Use the InstanceType parameter to specify the vCPU and memory specifications of the elastic container instance.

The following table describes the parameters that you can use to specify the Arm architecture of the instance. For more information, see CreateContainerGroup.

Parameter	Type	Example	Description
Cpu	number	2.0	The number of vCPUs that you want to allocate to the elastic container instance.
Memory	number	4.0	The memory size that you want to allocate to the elastic container instance. Unit: GiB.
Container.N.Cpu	number	0.5	The number of vCPUs that you want to allocate to container N.
Container.N.Memory	number	1.0	The memory size of container N. Unit: GiB.
InstanceType	String	2-4Gi	The specifications for the instance. You can specify up to five specifications at a time. Separate multiple specifications with commas (,). You can specify vCPU and memory specifications. You can also specify ECS types.
CpuArchitecture	String	ARM64	The CPU architecture of the instance. Default value: AMD64. Valid values: AMD64 ARM64

Sample configurations:

Example 1: Specify ECS Arm instance types

ContainerGroupName=test-arm
# Specify multiple ECS Arm instance types
InstanceType=ecs.c8y.large,ecs.g8y.large
# Create and associate an EIP to pull public images
AutoCreateEip=true
# Configure the container to use a container image for the Arm architecture
Container.1.Name=centos
Container.1.Image=arm64v8/centos:7.9.2009
Container.1.command.1=sleep
Container.1.Arg.1=999999

Example 2: Specify vCPU and memory specifications and a CPU architecture

ContainerGroupName=test-arm
# Specify the vCPU and memory for the instance
Cpu=2.0
Memory=4.0
# Specify the CPU architecture
CpuArchitecture=ARM64
# Create and associate an EIP to pull public images
AutoCreateEip=true
# Configure the container to use a container image for the Arm architecture
Container.1.Name=centos
Container.1.Image=arm64v8/centos:7.9.2009
Container.1.command.1=sleep
Container.1.Arg.1=999999

Console mode

In the Elastic Container Instance console, if the selected region and zone support Arm instance types, go to the Container Group Configurations section. Then, click the Specify Instance Type tab and select an ECS Arm instance type.

In the Architecture section, select the ARM Compute tab. From the instance type list, select an instance type, such as one from the general purpose g8y or compute optimized c8y families (Yitian processor).