The Nectar Research Cloud is used for a very broad spectrum of workloads, so we offer a range of flavor classes. 

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

The flavor classes are:

• Standard (m3)

• RAM Optimised (r3)

• CPU Optimised (c3)

• Tiny (t3)

Standard (m3)

Standard (m3) flavors are an evolution of the existing m1 and m2 flavors and are suited to most workloads. We’ve given the new standard (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 infrasturcture more efficently. 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 16 virtual CPUs, 32GB 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 64 GB 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 great 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 (m,r,c,t (3)) flavors don't have any ephemeral disk. Nectar is moving away from providing Ephemeral storage in public flavors. Ephemeral storage is less portable and flexible than Persistent Volume Storage. 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 filesystem 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 older m1 and m2 flavors

Older m1 and m2 flavors will be phased out but will continue to be available for approximately 6 months following release of the (m,r,c,t (3) flavors (exact date yet to be determined). 

During this time, 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.

Current instances will continue to run unaffected, even after the old flavors have been removed. 

Legacy flavors that use a name pre-fixed with 'm2' are:

• m2.tiny: 1 VCPUs, 768MB RAM, 5GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
• m2.xsmall: 1 VCPUs, 2GB RAM, 10GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
• m2.small: 1 VCPUs, 4GB RAM, 30GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
• m2.medium: 2 VCPUs, 6GB RAM, 30GB root disk, no ephemeral disk
• m2.large: 4 core, 12GB RAM, 30GB root disk, 80GB ephemeral disk
• m2.xlarge: 12 core, 48GB RAM, 30GB root disk, 360GB ephemeral disk

Legacy flavors that use a prefix of 'm1.' and have a 10G root disk.

• m1.small: 1 core, 4GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 30GB secondary disk
• m1.medium: 2 cores, 8GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 60GB secondary disk
• m1.large: 4 cores, 16GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 120GB secondary disk
• m1.xlarge: 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 240GB secondary disk
• m1.xxlarge: 16 cores, 64GB RAM, 10GB root disk, 480GB secondary disk