ECS Types

x86 and Kunpeng Architectures

ECS supports the following architectures:

• x86 architecture

  The x86 architecture uses the complex instruction set computer (CISC). CISC is a computer architecture in which single instructions can execute several low-level operations. There are a large number of instructions, and each of them has different lengths. CISC processors take longer time to execute instructions because they have more complex instructions.

• Kunpeng architecture

  The Kunpeng architecture uses the reduced instruction set computer (RISC). RISC a microprocessor architecture with a simple collection and highly customized set of instructions. It is built to minimize the instruction execution time by optimizing and limiting the number of instructions.

  The Kunpeng architecture provides a better balance between performance and power consumption than the x86 architecture.

QingTian Architecture

The QingTian architecture is a Huawei-engineered virtualization system with hardware-software synergy. For details about specifications of instances using the QingTian architecture (QingTian ECSs), see A Summary List of x86 ECS Specifications.

SDI cards of QingTian ECSs support Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certifications.

ECS Flavor Naming Rules

Figure 1 shows a flavor name, which consists of the instance family and generation, instance size, and memory/vCPU ratio.

Figure 1 Flavor naming rule

Certain flavor names contain additional identifiers. For example, c6h.22xlarge.2.physical contains the additional identifier physical, which indicates that this instance is a bare metal ECS.

• Instance types

  Instance types are named in the following format: CPU architecture + instance family + instance generation + additional capabilities.

  Table 2 describes the naming rule for instance types.

  Table 2 Naming rule for instance types

  Item	Description	Rule	Example
  CPU architecture	Indicates the CPU architecture.	Represented in lowercase letters.	x86: There is no prefix by default. Kunpeng: The prefix is a lowercase letter k.
  Instance family	Indicates the typical scenarios.	Represented in lowercase letters.	See Table 3.
  Instance generation	Indicates the evolution of the instance family.	Represented in a digit. The digit increases as the hardware and architecture evolves.	None
  Additional capabilities	Indicate the enhanced capabilities of instances when compared with the other instances of the same generation.	Represented in lowercase letters.	See Table 4.

  Table 3 Instance families

  Scenarios	Segmented Scenarios	Instance Family	Description
  General-purpose	General computing-basic	t	Turbo
  	General computing	s	Standard
  	General computing/General computing-plus	x	Flexus X
  	General computing-plus	c	Compute
  High-performance computing	High-performance computing	h	High performance
  Big data	Disk-intensive	d	Disk
  	Ultra-high I/O (large-capacity local disks)	i	IOPS
  	Ultra-high I/O (small-capacity local disks)	ir	IOPS RAID
  Memory-intensive	Memory-optimized	m	Memory
  	Large-memory	e	Enhanced memory
  Computing-accelerated	GPU computing-accelerated	p	Parallel
  	GPU graphics-accelerated	g	Graphic
  	GPU inference-accelerated	pi	Parallel inference
  	FPGA-accelerated	fp	FPGA performance
  	AI inference-accelerated	ai	Ascend inference

  Table 4 Additional capabilities

  Suffix	Example	Description
  ne	c3ne	Network Enhanced
  s	c6s	Standard
  v	p2v	NVLink
  i	d7i	IOPS
  h	c6h	High performance
  e	c7e	Enhance
  t	c7t	Trust

• Instance sizes

  The instance sizes can be small, medium, large, xlarge, or Nxlarge, as shown in Table 5.

  For example, 2xlarge in s6.2xlarge.4 (N is 2) indicates that there are 8 vCPUs (2 × 4).

  Table 5 Mapping between instance sizes and the number of vCPUs

  Instance Size	vCPUs
  small	1
  medium	1
  large	2
  xlarge	4
  Nxlarge	N × 4. A larger value of N indicates more vCPUs.

• Memory/vCPU ratio

  It is represented by a digit.

  For example, 4 in s6.2xlarge.4 indicates a memory-to-vCPU ratio of 4, which means that there are 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory.

• Additional identifies

  The bare metal ECSs that share a resource pool with BMSs are identified by "physical".

  For example, physical in c6h.22xlarge.2.physical indicates a bare metal ECS that shares a resource pool with BMSs.

vCPU

ECS supports hyper-threading, which enables two threads to run concurrently on a single CPU core. Each thread is represented as a virtual CPU (vCPU), and a CPU core contains two vCPUs (logical cores).

For example, a 2-core physical CPU contains 4 vCPUs (threads).

Hyper-threading is enabled for most ECS flavors by default. If hyper-threading is disabled during the ECS creation or flavor change, the number of vCPUs is half of the number of vCPUs defined by the ECS flavor.

Network QoS

Network QoS uses basic technologies to improve the quality of network communication. A network with QoS enabled offers predictable network performance and effectively allocates network bandwidth.

For details about the QoS data of an ECS flavor, including the maximum/assured network bandwidth (Gbit/s), maximum network PPS, maximum NIC queues, and maximum NICs, see A Summary List of x86 ECS Specifications.

Constraints on network performance vary depending on ECS flavors.

• Assured network bandwidth: indicates the guaranteed bandwidth allocated to an ECS when there is a network bandwidth contention in the entire network.
• Maximum network bandwidth: indicates the maximum bandwidth that can be allocated to an ECS when the ECS does not compete for network bandwidth (other ECSs on the host do not have high requirements on network bandwidth).
• Maximum network PPS: indicates the maximum number of packets that an ECS can transmit and receive per second.

  Packets per second (PPS): indicates the number of packets received and sent per second. It is usually used to measure the network performance.

• NIC multi-queues: allocates NIC interruptions to multiple vCPUs for higher PPS performance and bandwidth
• Maximum NICs: indicates the maximum number of NICs that can be attached to an ECS.
• Maximum supplementary NICs: indicates the maximum number of supplementary NICs that can be attached to an ECS.
• IPv6: indicates whether ECSs support IPv6 addresses.

  ECS flavors that support IPv6 vary depending on regions and AZs. Whether a flavor supports IPv6 addresses is subject to the console display after you select a region and an AZ on the Buy ECS page.

  Figure 2 Checking whether an ECS flavor supports IPv6
  

• For instructions about how to test PPS, see How Can I Test Network Performance?
• For instructions about how to enable NIC multi-queue, see Enabling NIC Multi-Queue.
• The maximum bandwidth is the total bandwidth allocated to an ECS. If an ECS has multiple NICs, the sum of the maximum bandwidths allocated to all NICs cannot exceed the maximum bandwidth allocated to the ECS.
• A NIC refers to an elastic network interface. You can create and configure network interfaces and attach them to your ECSs for flexible and highly available network configurations.

  For details, see Elastic Network Interface.

• A supplementary NIC is a supplement to NICs. If the number of NICs that can be attached to your ECSs cannot meet your requirements, you can use supplementary NICs.

  For details, see Supplementary Network Interface.

Dedicated and Shared ECSs