About anbox capacity planning

Hi, Thanks for your support in advance.

I’ve installed anbox appliance on AWS.
There will be many containers. e.g. 200
But less than 10 containers will be running simultaneously.
Note, they will have running and stopped statuses periodically.

  1. is the stopped container counted as it uses the resources?
    I’ve noticed that I could not launch a container when I had 1 running container and N stopped containers.
  2. for my use case above, can someone recommend a way to scale up/down efficiently?

I am looking forward to hearing back.
Best regards.

Alex.

  1. is the stopped container counted as it uses the resources?
    I’ve noticed that I could not launch a container when I had 1 running container and N stopped containers.
    A: Yes, the resources that were allocated when starting a container are still kept when a container stopped.
    Regarding the case that you described I’ve noticed that I could not launch a container when I had 1 running container and N stopped containers. Depending on the instance type for your AWS EC2 instance and also the instance-type/resources declared in the application manifest file, the insufficient system resources like cpu/memory/disk/gpu-slot (check the output of amc node show lxd0) would block you from launching more containers further if there’re multiple stopped container kept in your AMS. This example would give you a clear idea on how to determine the capacity that is needed for your deployment.

Things get improved somewhat in the upcoming Anbox Cloud 1.18.0 release that whenever a container gets stopped, other than the root disk(to support the case that starts a container from stopped status) all other resources are freed up and will be allocated when starting again for the better resources management. That’s being said, the insufficient root capacity would still impact the case of the container start.

  1. for my use case above, can someone recommend a way to scale up/down efficiently?
    A: Regarding your requirement that There will be many containers. e.g. 200, And yes you could continue to use Appliance to manage the cluster for the scaling. However depending on the number of containers running simultaneously and the type of applications (E.g. graphics intensive game or general Android application), you could also consider using full Anbox Cloud deployment at a large scale. Please refer to the doc for more details.

Hi gary.
Thanks for your reply.

That sounds great.
I am looking forward to seeing it on AWS marketplace.

Best regards.

Alex.