Help Center/ Cloud Container Engine/ FAQs/ Related Services/ What Are the Differences Between CCE and CCI?
Updated on 2025-05-21 GMT+08:00

What Are the Differences Between CCE and CCI?

Description

Table 1 Introduction to CCE and CCI

Cloud Container Engine (CCE)

Cloud Container Instance (CCI)

CCE provides highly scalable, high-performance, enterprise-class Kubernetes clusters and supports Docker containers. CCE is a one-stop container platform that provides full-stack container services from Kubernetes cluster management, lifecycle management of containerized applications, application service mesh, and Helm charts to add-on management, application scheduling, and monitoring and O&M. With CCE, you can easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications on Huawei Cloud.

For details, see What Is Cloud Container Engine?

CCI is a serverless container service that allows you to run containers without creating or managing server clusters. With CCI, you only need to manage containerized services running on Kubernetes. You can quickly create and run container workloads on CCI without managing clusters and servers. Because of the serverless architecture, CCI frees you from containerized application O&M and allows you to focus on the services themselves.

Serverless is an architectural approach that eliminates the need to create, manage, or monitor servers. You simply request the necessary resources for your applications, while server management is handled by dedicated teams. This enables you to focus entirely on application development, boosting efficiency and cutting IT costs. Traditionally, to run containerized workloads using Kubernetes, you need to create a Kubernetes cluster first.

Creation Mode

Table 2 Creation modes

Cloud Container Engine (CCE)

Cloud Container Instance (CCI)

CCE is a hosted Kubernetes service for container management. It allows you to create native Kubernetes clusters with just a few clicks.

You need to create clusters and nodes to use CCE. They are easy to create on an intuitive console and highly available. You do not need to manage master nodes.

CCI provides a serverless container engine. When deploying containers on Huawei Cloud, you do not need to purchase and manage ECSs, eliminating the need for O&M and management.

You do not need to create clusters, master nodes, or work nodes, but directly start applications.

Billing

Table 3 Different billing modes

Aspect

Cloud Container Engine (CCE)

Cloud Container Instance (CCI)

Pricing

Related resources (such as nodes and bandwidth) will be created when CCE is used. You need to pay for these resources.

CCI instance resources include CPUs, memory, and GPUs. You will be billed by the actual instance resource specifications.

Billing mode

Pay-per-use and yearly/monthly billing modes are supported.

Pay-per-use billing mode is supported.

Minimum pricing unit

By hour

Billed by second. The bill run period is hour.

Application Scenario

Table 4 Different application scenarios

Cloud Container Engine (CCE)

Cloud Container Instance (CCI)

Applicable to all scenarios. Generally, large-scale and long-term stable applications are running. For example:

  • E-commerce
  • Service mid-end
  • IT system

Applicable to scenarios with obvious peak and off-peak hours. Resources can be flexibly requested to improve resource utilization. For example:

  • Batch computing
  • High-performance computing
  • Scale-out upon traffic bursts
  • CI/CD test

Cluster Creation

Table 5 Creation modes

Cloud Container Engine (CCE)

Cloud Container Instance (CCI)

Process of using CCE:

  1. Creating a cluster

    Configure basic information such as the name, region, and network.

  2. Creating a node

    Specify the node specifications and data disk size.

  3. Configuring the cluster

    Install cluster add-ons, such as networking, monitoring, and logs.

  4. Creating a workload in the cluster

Process of using CCI:

  1. Creating a namespace

    Configure basic information such as the name, region, and network.

  2. Creating a workload

Cooperation Between CCE and CCI

The CCE Cloud Bursting Engine for CCI add-on can schedule Deployments, StatefulSets, and jobs running on CCE to CCI when there are traffic spikes. This can reduce consumption caused by cluster scaling.

Functions:

  • Automatic pod scaling within seconds: When CCE cluster resources are insufficient, there is no need to add nodes to the CCE cluster. The CCE Cloud Bursting Engine for CCI add-on automatically creates pods in CCI, eliminating the overhead of resizing the CCE cluster.
  • Seamlessly integration with Huawei Cloud SWR: You can use public and private images in SWR repositories.
  • Support for operations like event synchronization, monitoring, logging, exec command execution, and status query for CCI pods
  • You can view the capacity information about virtual elastic nodes.
  • CCE and CCI pods can communicate with each other through the Service networks.

For details, see Elastic Scaling of CCE Pods to CCI.