Elastic Container Instance:Create an instance by specifying a computing category

Choose a compute category

Guidelines:

• Cost-sensitive workloads (batch processing, dev/test, simple web services): Use economy. Economy instances have a lower vCPU unit price, so savings grow with scale. Performance fluctuation is acceptable in these scenarios.

• Production services that require stable, consistent performance (APIs, microservices, latency-sensitive applications): Use general. General instances deliver higher performance than same-spec instances created without a compute category.

• High-availability scenarios: Specify multiple compute categories. ECI tries each category in the order you specify, which reduces instance creation failures caused by resource exhaustion.

Limitations

• Requires vCPU and memory spec mode. This feature only applies when you create instances by specifying vCPU and memory. If you specify ECS instance types instead, those take precedence and the ComputeCategory parameter is ignored.

• Not supported for preemptible instances. Setting both a preemptible instance category and a compute category returns a FeatureBasedConstraintConflict error.

• Not supported for Arm-based instances. Setting both an Arm CPU architecture and a compute category returns a FeatureBasedConstraintConflict error.

Billing

Economy compute category

Compared to instances created without a compute category, economy instances have a lower vCPU unit price and the same memory unit price.

General compute category

Supported specifications

Configure the compute category

Use the ComputeCategory parameter in the CreateContainerGroup API operation. Specify vCPU and memory using one of the following methods:

Parameters

How instances are scheduled

After you set ComputeCategory, ECI determines the actual instance spec and category based on the following rules:

Priority rules for multiple specs or categories

When multiple InstanceType values and multiple ComputeCategory values are set, ECI iterates through all spec+category combinations, with specs as the outer loop and categories as the inner loop. For example, InstanceType=4-8Gi,8-16Gi,16-32Gi and ComputeCategory=general,economy produces this attempt sequence:

1. 4-8Gi, general

2. 4-8Gi, economy

3. 8-16Gi, general

4. 8-16Gi, economy

5. 16-32Gi, general

6. 16-32Gi, economy (invalid — automatically skipped because 16 vCPUs exceeds the economy category's 8-vCPU maximum)

Examples

Example 1: Set container-level specs and use the economy category

ContainerGroupName=test-category
# Set the compute category to economy.
ComputeCategory.1=economy
# Specify the vCPU and memory specs 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: Set instance-level specs and specify both categories as a fallback

ContainerGroupName=test-category
# Set the vCPU and memory specs at the instance level.
Cpu=4.0
Memory=8.0
# Try general first, then fall back to economy if resources are unavailable.
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 instance specs with the general category

ContainerGroupName=test-category
# Specify multiple instance specs — ECI uses the first one with available resources.
 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