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Elastic Container Instance:API overview

Last Updated:Oct 31, 2025

API standard and pre-built SDKs in multi-language

The OpenAPI specification of this product (Eci/2018-08-08) follows the RPC standard. Alibaba Cloud provides pre-built SDKs for popular programming languages to abstract low-level complexities such as request signing. This enables developers to call APIs using language-specific syntax without dealing with HTTP details directly.

Custom signature

If your specific needs, such as a customized signature, are not supported by the SDK, manually sign requests using the signature mechanism. Note that manual signing requires significant effort (usually about 5 business days). For support, join our DingTalk group (ID: 147535001692).

Before you begin

An Alibaba Cloud account has full administrative privileges. A compromised AccessKey pair exposes all associated resources to unauthorized access, posing a significant security risk. Create a Resource Access Management (RAM) user with API-only access and use RAM policies to apply the principle of least privilege (PoLP). Alibaba Cloud accounts are only used when explicitly required.

To call APIs securely, configure the following:

Regions

API

Title

Description

DescribeRegions DescribeRegions Queries the regions and zones supported by Elastic Container Instance.

Container groups

API

Title

Description

CreateContainerGroup CreateContainerGroup Call the CreateContainerGroup operation to create an Elastic Container Instance (ECI), which is also known as a container group.
UpdateContainerGroup UpdateContainerGroup This operation updates an instance.
DescribeContainerGroups DescribeContainerGroups You can call DescribeContainerGroups to query information about multiple ECI instances.
DescribeContainerGroupStatus DescribeContainerGroupStatus You can call DescribeContainerGroupStatus to perform a batch query on the status of multiple Elastic Container Instance (ECI) instances.
DescribeContainerGroupEvents DescribeContainerGroupEvents Queries events for multiple Elastic Container Instance (ECI) instances in a batch.
ResizeContainerGroupVolume ResizeContainerGroupVolume You can call the ResizeContainerGroupVolume operation to resize a disk volume mounted to a specified Elastic Container Instance (ECI).
RestartContainerGroup RestartContainerGroup The RestartContainerGroup operation restarts an ECI instance.
DeleteContainerGroup DeleteContainerGroup You can call DeleteContainerGroup to delete an ECI instance.

Container

API

Title

Description

ExecContainerCommand ExecContainerCommand Executes a command in a container.
DescribeContainerLog DescribeContainerLog Queries the logs of a container in a container group.
CommitContainer CommitContainer Call the CommitContainer operation to create an asynchronous task that saves a specified container in an Elastic Container Instance (ECI) instance as an image and pushes the image to an image repository in Alibaba Cloud Container Registry (ACR).
DescribeCommitContainerTask DescribeCommitContainerTask The DescribeCommitContainerTask operation queries the details of a CommitContainer task.

Image caches

API

Title

Description

CreateImageCache CreateImageCache You can call the CreateImageCache operation to create an image cache. This accelerates image pulling and reduces the startup time for Elastic Container Instance (ECI) instances.
DeleteImageCache DeleteImageCache You can call this operation to delete an image cache.
UpdateImageCache UpdateImageCache Updates an image cache.
DescribeImageCaches DescribeImageCaches Queries the details of one or more image caches.

Data cache

API

Title

Description

CreateDataCache CreateDataCache Creates a data cache.
DescribeDataCaches DescribeDataCaches Queries the details of one or more data caches.
UpdateDataCache UpdateDataCache Updates a data cache.
CopyDataCache CopyDataCache Copies a data cache from one region to another.
DeleteDataCache DeleteDataCache Deletes a data cache.

Virtual nodes

API

Title

Description

CreateVirtualNode CreateVirtualNode Call CreateVirtualNode to create a virtual node. The virtual node connects to a self-managed Kubernetes cluster and enables the cluster to scale out resources to ECI.
DeleteVirtualNode DeleteVirtualNode Deletes a virtual node.
UpdateVirtualNode UpdateVirtualNode You can call the UpdateVirtualNode operation to update the properties of a virtual node.
DescribeVirtualNodes DescribeVirtualNodes Queries the details of one or more virtual nodes.

Monitoring

API

Title

Description

DescribeContainerGroupMetric DescribeContainerGroupMetric Queries the monitoring data of an Elastic Container Instance (ECI).
DescribeMultiContainerGroupMetric DescribeMultiContainerGroupMetric You can call the DescribeContainerGroupMetric operation to query the monitoring data of an ECI instance.

Operations and maintenance

API

Title

Description

CreateInstanceOpsTask CreateInstanceOpsTask Call CreateInstanceOpsTask to create an Operations and Maintenance (O&M) task.
DescribeInstanceOpsRecords DescribeInstanceOpsRecords You can call DescribeInstanceOpsRecords to query the O&M task records for an instance.

Tags

API

Title

Description

TagResources TagResources The TagResources operation attaches tags to specified ECI resources.
ListTagResources ListTagResources You can call the ListTagResources operation to query the tags that are attached to ECI resources.
UntagResources UntagResources You can call UntagResources to detach tags from specified ECI resources.

Other operations

API

Title

Description

ListUsage ListUsage Call the ListUsage operation to query the privilege quotas in a specified region. The response returns the used amount and the upper limit of each quota.
DescribeContainerGroupPrice DescribeContainerGroupPrice Queries the price of an Elastic Container Instance (ECI) instance.
DescribeAvailableResource DescribeAvailableResource You can call the DescribeAvailableResource operation to query the ECS instance families that are available in a specified region and zone.