Instances

Instances are the runtime units that execute your project's code. When your application is deployed, the code is built and packaged into a container image and run as an Instance.

Under the hood, Instances are microVMs (opens in a new tab) which serve as a thin, isolated, high performance wrapper around your code. Each Instance is associated with a single Deployment of a Service and runs in one of Koyeb's regions.

Instance types

The Instance type determines the resources (CPU, Memory, Disk) allocated to your application. You can select your Instance type in your Service's Deployment configuration. You can customize the Instance type running in each region when deploying to multiple regions.

GPU Instance types

The GPU Instance types (available in specific regions) include:

Standard Instance types

The Standard Instance types include:

Eco Instance types

The Eco Instance types (available in Washington, D.C., Frankfurt, and Singapore) include:

Free Instances

The Free Instance allows you to preview the Koyeb platform and deploy a Web Service free of charge. Each Free Instance provides 512MB of RAM, 0.1 vCPU, and 2GB of SSD. Each organization is limited to one Free Instance.

Free Instances are perfect for testing the platform and working on hobby projects, and should not be used for production applications.

Free Instances have important limitations you should be aware of:

• They can be deployed in only one region, either Frankfurt or Washington, D.C.
• They can't be used as a Worker Services.
• They can't have custom Scaling configurations.
• They can't be used with Volumes to add persistent storage to your services.
• They scale down to zero when they don’t receive any traffic for 1 hour.

Instance life cycle

Each Instance's life cycle is closely related to that of the Deployment it belongs to. Instance health statuses affect Deployment health statuses and that health status bubbles up to the Service and App levels. Likewise, changes in Service configuration affect how Instances start and stop and whether they receive traffic routed to the application.

When deploying from a git repository, Instances will be provisioned once the build succeeded. When deploying from a container registry, Instances will be provisioned when the image is downloaded and other requirements are met.

When an Instance responds to health checks as expected, Koyeb will mark the Instance as healthy and add it to the group of Instances that are targets for load balancing. If an Instance stops responding to health checks or fails to reach a healthy state during initial provisioning, it will be marked as unhealthy.

If an Instance is not working correctly, a new Deployment is promoted, or the Instance's Service is deleted, the Instance will be stopped. This will remove the Instance from the Service load balancer's list of targets and then stop and delete the Instance.

Instance statuses

Instances can have several statuses during their life cycle:

• Allocating: A start request has been received and the Instance is about to start.
• Starting: The Instance is running but health checks have not yet succeed.
• Healthy: The Instance is running and health checks are succeeding.
• Unhealthy: The Instance is running but health checks are failing.
• Stopping: The Instance is being stopped. This happens when a Service change is requested and the Deployment that the Instance is associated with is stopping.
• Stopped: The Instance is stopped.
• Error: The Instance failed to start.

In addition to the Instance status, messages are provided with additional information. These messages can be helpful when troubleshooting problems with a specific Instance or a Deployment.