The Nectar Research Cloud is used for a very broad spectrum of workloads, so we offer a range of flavor classes. A flavor defines the size of compute resources (number of virtual CPUs, memory and storage capacity) that can be assigned automatically to virtual machine instances in a cloud configuration.

Nectar flavors make it easier to support different user requirements, and enable efficient use of the Nectar Cloud infrastructure.

The latest generation of flavor classes are the:

• Balanced (m3)
• RAM Optimised (r3)
• CPU Optimised (c3)
• Tiny (t3)

These third generation flavors are outlined below.

Balanced (m3)

The Balanced (m3) flavors are an evolution of the existing m1 and m2 flavors and are suited to most workloads. We've given the new balanced (m3) flavors more VCPUs over the older m1 and m2 flavors but reduced the memory per core to 2GB since many applications don't need more than that, and it allows us to use the infrastructure more efficiently. If you need more memory you can request RAM optimised flavors (see below). All Standard (m3) will come with a 30GB root disk and will go up to a maximum of 32 virtual CPUs, 64GB RAM.

RAM Optimised (r3)

For workloads that require more memory, we’re offering the RAM Optimised (r3) flavors. These flavors can be made available to you by requesting them through the Allocation Request Form.

CPU Optimised (c3)

For workloads that use more CPU cycles, we have the CPU Optimised (c3) flavors. We think these will be best suited to compute-intensive workloads. These flavors can be made available to you by requesting them through the Project Allocation Form. The CPU Optimised (c3) flavors go up to a maximum size of 32 virtual CPUs and 64GB RAM, with the VCPUs given a higher priority for CPU cycles on the physical server over other flavors.

Tiny (t3)

The Tiny (t3) flavours are a great choice for testing and prototyping or even just simple workloads with 1GB RAM per virtual CPU core available in 1, 2 and 4-core, with smaller 10GB root disks.

Please note that the recently introduced third generation flavors don't have any ephemeral disk. Ephemeral storage is less portable and flexible than Persistent Volume Storage as it can't be snapshotted, shared, easily migrated or resized. For situations where you may require more disk space than what is provided as part of the root file system of the instance, we recommend creating and attaching Volume Storage, which can be any size required. There are also other storage options like the Shared File System Storage service and Object Storage which are well suited for different use cases.

Phasing out the first and second generation flavors

Older second generation (m1 and m2) flavors are being phased out but will continue to be available for a limited period of time.The first step in the process of deprecating the old m1 and m2 flavors will commence on 1 Feb 2020 by removing m1 and m2 flavors from the dashboard. For Nectar Research Cloud users this will mean that only third generation flavors will be available to instantiate a virtual machine instance from the dashboard.

We encourage you to start using the new flavors in your projects and update any Heat templates, scripts or any other build systems you may be using.

The second generation legacy flavors that use a name prefixed with 'm2' are:

The first generation flavors that use a prefix of 'm1.' and have a 10G root disk are: