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Elastic Container Instance:Encrypt temporary storage space

Last Updated:Jun 08, 2026

Encrypt the temporary storage space of an elastic container instance to protect data at rest and meet compliance requirements. Encryption uses AES-256 with KMS-managed service keys and applies automatically to all reads and writes.

How it works

Each elastic container instance provides 30 GiB of temporary storage space by default for container images and runtime data. You can increase this size as needed.

To enable encryption, add an annotation to the pod metadata. Elastic Container Instance then encrypts all data on the storage space with AES-256 using KMS service keys, which are free of charge.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

Note

KMS automatically creates and manages service keys at no cost.

Enable encryption

Add the following annotation to your pod metadata:

Annotation

Value

Description

k8s.aliyun.com/eci-ephemeral-storage-options

"{\"encrypted\":\"true\"}"

Enables AES-256 encryption for the temporary storage space

Important
  • Annotations must be added to the metadata in the configuration file of the pod. For example, when you create a Deployment, you must add annotations in the spec.template.metadata section.

  • Elastic Container Instance-related annotations are only applied when a pod is created. Adding or modifying these annotations on an existing pod will have no effect.

Example: Deployment with encrypted storage

The following Deployment enables temporary storage encryption:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: kms-test
  labels:
    app: test
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: test
  template:
    metadata:
      name: kms-test
      labels:
        app: test
        alibabacloud.com/eci: "true"       # Schedule the pod on Elastic Container Instance
      annotations:
        k8s.aliyun.com/eci-ephemeral-storage-options: "{\"encrypted\":\"true\"}"  # Encrypt the temporary storage space
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: test
        image: registry-vpc.cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/eci_open/nginx:1.4.2