Instance Types

An instance type picks the vCPU count, memory, baseline network bandwidth, and underlying hardware family for a VM. You pick one at create time and can change it later with exc compute resize.

List what’s available:

exc compute instancetype list

Pricing for each family: Compute pricing and GPU pricing.

Current families

Family	What it is	Pick when
t1a.<size>	Burstable, EBS-backed	Cheap dev boxes, runners, intermittent workloads
m1a.<size>	Dedicated CPU, EBS-backed	Web apps, APIs, batch workers, anything steady-state
g1.<size>-<gpu> / nv*	GPU instances	LLM inference, ML training, professional visualisation

Naming: family prefix + dot + size.

• Sizes in t1a go micro, small, medium.
• Sizes in m1a go large, xlarge, 2xlarge, 4xlarge, 8xlarge, 16xlarge — doubling vCPU and RAM at each step.
• GPU instances name the card in the suffix (e.g. nv1a.4xlarge ships an Nvidia RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell). See the GPU pricing page for the full catalogue.

Memory and network bandwidth scale with size within a family. Exact ratios live in exc compute instancetype list and on the pricing pages.

Deprecated families

Family	Replacement	Notes
n1.<n>c (e.g. n1.2c, n1.16c)	m1a.<size>	EOL — use m1a for new VMs
t1.<size> (e.g. t1.micro)	t1a.<size>	EOL — use t1a for new VMs

Existing VMs on deprecated types keep running but can’t be created or resized into. See Compute bandwidth limits for the bandwidth tables, including the deprecated rows.

Picking a family

Workload	Try
Web app, API, batch worker	m1a.large / m1a.xlarge / m1a.2xlarge
Cheap dev box, runners	t1a.micro / t1a.small
LLM inference, ML training	nv* GPU instances (see GPU pricing)
Heavy database / cache	Larger m1a.* with provisioned-IOPS volumes

Resize

Stop the VM, resize, start:

exc compute stop    --vm_id 42
exc compute resize  --vm_id 42 --instance_type m1a.2xlarge
exc compute start   --vm_id 42

The root and data volumes survive the resize unchanged.

Bandwidth caps

Each instance type has a maximum transmit bandwidth, listed in the Compute bandwidth limits page. Receive bandwidth is uncapped today.

Quotas

Your org has a per-account vCPU quota (see exc quota). To raise it, email support@excloud.dev with the workload context.