A cloudlet is a small slice of computing power within our infrastructure. It consists of 128 MB RAM and 400 MHz CPU simultaneously.
When setting up your environments, you’ll establish a minimum number of reserved cloudlets and max number of dynamic cloudlets. These cloudlets serve as the basis for our usage-based pricing model.
- Reserved cloudlets are reserved in advance and will be charged irrespective of your actual resource usage. In exchange, you’ll get significant automatic discounts based on their number.
- Dynamic cloudlets are added & removed automatically according to the amount of resources that are required by your application in a particular moment of time – i.e. they’re assigned when the load goes up and removed again as soon as it drops down. As a result, you pay based on your actual resource usage. This type of cloudlet helps to cope with unexpected surges in demand without any pre-planning, special coding, or overpaying for resources you won’t need the majority of the time. In such a way, with the Dynamic Cloudlets slider, you set the container’s Scaling Limit, defining the maximum possible number of cloudlets available to be allocated for it.
In order to gain the maximum benefit from usage-based pricing, it is recommended to use dynamic cloudlets alongside the reserved cloudlets to get all the advantages of your application’s automatic vertical scaling and automatic discounts.