This topic describes different states in the lifecycle of an elastic container instance. You can design and implement your business logic based on the states. Elastic Container Instance is seamlessly connected to Kubernetes. You can directly use elastic container instances as pods in Kubernetes clusters.
Status of elastic container instances
The following table describes the states of an elastic container instance during its lifecycle.
State | Description |
|---|---|
Scheduling | The elastic container instance is being created. |
Pending | One or more containers in the elastic container instance are being started, and no containers are running. |
Running | All containers in the elastic container instance are created, and at least one container is running or restarting. |
Restarting | The elastic container instance is restarting. |
Updating | The elastic container instance is being updated. |
Terminating | The elastic container instance is being terminated. A running instance configured with preStop enters the Terminating state when the instance is being deleted. After you run the preStop function, the instance is deleted. |
Succeeded | All containers in the elastic container instance are terminated after they successfully run and not about to restart. |
Failed | All containers in the elastic container instance are terminated after they run, and at least one container is terminated due to runtime errors, which indicates that the container exits with a non-zero status or is terminated by the system. |
Expired | The elastic container instance is a preemptible instance and is terminated due to resource expiration and recycling. |
ScheduleFailed | The elastic container instance failed to be created. The system deletes the elastic container instance after 24 hours, and you are not charged for the elastic container instance. |
The restart policy of an elastic container instance applies only to containers within the elastic container instance. The elastic container instance itself does not automatically restart.
The following figure shows the state transition of an elastic container instance during its lifecycle. 
The system automatically releases the instances that are in the Succeeded or Failed state, but retains the metadata of the latest 100 instances. When the system releases the instances, other resources such as Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs) that are created along with the instances are also released.
Container status
State | Description |
|---|---|
Waiting | The container is waiting for being created. Typically, application containers remain in the Waiting state before an init container exits the Running state. |
Running | The container is created and running. |
Terminated | The container is terminated and exits after a successful or failed run. |