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Flavors

Service description

Flavors define the compute, memory, and storage capacity of virtual machine (VM) instances. A flavor specifies a combination of resources that determines the size and capabilities of the virtual machines that can be launched. When you create a new instance, you select a flavor to determine the resources that will be allocated to it.

Features

  • vCPUs (Virtual CPUs): The number of virtual CPU cores assigned to the instance. This determines the compute power available to the instance.
  • RAM (Memory): The amount of memory (RAM) allocated to the instance, typically specified in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB).
  • Root Disk: The size of the root disk for the instance, usually specified in gigabytes (GB). This is the primary storage device where the operating system and other system files are stored.
  • Ephemeral Disk (Optional): Some flavors may include an additional ephemeral disk, which provides temporary storage that is erased when the instance is terminated. This is useful for storing data that doesn't need to be persistent.
  • Swap Disk (Optional): Some flavors can also include swap space, which is used as virtual memory when the physical RAM is fully utilized.

Flavors are predefined by cloud administrators and are used to standardize the sizes of instances that can be launched. This helps in managing resources efficiently and ensures that you can choose the appropriate size for your workloads based on your requirements.

Key concepts

How it works

  1. Flavors are predefined profiles that specify a combination of CPU cores (vCPUs), memory (RAM), and root disk size. For example, a "small" flavor might offer 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM, and 20 GB of disk space, while a "large" flavor might offer 4 vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM, and 80 GB of disk space.
  2. When creating an instance, select a flavor that matches your resource requirements. Compute service then uses this flavor to allocate the necessary resources on the compute host where the instance will run.
  3. The flavor determines how much of the compute host's CPU, memory, and disk resources are allocated to the instance. This ensures that the instance has the resources it needs to operate and that the compute host's resources are efficiently utilized.

Flavors console

Command line tools

API methods