services.xml: Vespa Cloud

services.xml is the primary Vespa configuration file. This documents services.xml amendments for Vespa Cloud - see services.xml at docs.vespa.ai for the general reference.

<nodes>

In cloud applications nodes are specified by count and node resources. Example:

<nodes count="4">
  <resources vcpu="2.5" memory="32Gb" disk="1Tb"/>
</nodes>

Subelements: resources

Attributes:

count: An integer or range. The number of nodes of the cluster.
exclusive (optional): true or false (default false). If true, the nodes of this cluster will be placed on hosts shared only with other nodes of the same application. This is useful for container clusters in applications storing sensitive data or secrets as it adds another layer of protection against leaking sensitive information between applications sharing host.

In addition there are some attributes for specific cluster types, listed below.

<nodes> for <container>

of (optional): A content cluster id. This attribute can be used to specify that this container service should run on the nodes of a content service. If of is specified, only jvmargs can be set in addition. No other attributes can be set, as the ones of the referenced content cluster will be used instead.

<nodes> for <content>

groups (optional): Integer or range. Sets the number of groups into which content nodes should be divided. Each group will have an equal share of the nodes and redundancy copies of the corpus, and each query will be routed to just one group. This allows scaling to a higher query load than within a single group.
Note that in Vespa Cloud, redundancy means replicas per group. In Open Source Vespa, redundancy is total number of replicas across groups - details.

<nodes> for <controllers> <slobroks> and <logservers>

The nodes element nested in these elements allow specifying whether the nodes used should be dedicated to the service or if it should run on existing nodes. Attribute:

dedicated (optional): true or false (default false). Whether separate nodes should be allocated for this service or not.

<resources>

Contained in the nodes element, specifies each node's resource requirements. Resources is a powerful way to optimize cost and performance. For new launches, allocate enough to reduce risk - then use the performance guides to find the sweet spot to balance cost and free capacity, based on real production load. Migration to new capacity is automated, read more in elastic Vespa.

Subelements: None

Attributes:

vcpu float or range CPU, virtual threads

memory float or range, each followed by a byte unit, such as "Gb" Memory

disk float or range, each followed by a byte unit, such as "Gb" Disk space

storage-type (optional)

string (enum)

The type of storage to use. This is useful to specify local storage when network storage provides insufficient io operations or too noisy io performance.

`local`	Node-local storage is required.
`remote`	Network storage must be used.
`any` (default)	Both remote or local storage may be used.

disk-speed (optional)

string (enum)

The required disk speed category.

`fast` (default)	SSD-like disk speed is required
`slow`	This is sized for spinning disk speed
`any`	Performance does not depend on disk speed (often suitable for container clusters).

See index bootstrap for how to set resources in a step-by-step procedure, estimating settings by feeding smaller subsets. Also note that autoscaling described below is not designed for index bootstrapping, as a bootstrap normally is much quicker than a cluster will autoscale.

Autoscaling ranges

Resources specified as a range will be autoscaled by the system. Ranges are expressed by the syntax [lower-limit, upper-limit]. Both limits are inclusive.

Autoscaling will attempt to keep utilization of all allocated resources close to ideal, and will automatically reconfigure to the cheapest option allowed by the ranges when necessary.

The ideal utilization takes into account that a node may be down or failing, that another region may be down causing doubling of traffic, and that we need headroom for maintenance operations and handling requests with low latency. It acts on what it has observed on your system in the recent past. If you need much more capacity in the near future than you do currently, you may want to set the lower limit to take this into account. Upper limits should be set to the maximum size that makes business sense.

When a new cluster (or application) is deployed it will initially be configured with the minimal resources given by the ranges. When autoscaling is turned on for an existing cluster, it will continue unchanged until autoscaling determines that a change is beneficial.

Examples:

Autoscaling node count:

<nodes count="[4, 8]">
  <resources vcpu="2.5" memory="32Gb" disk="100Gb" disk-speed="any"/>
</nodes>

Autoscaling on all resources:

<nodes count="[4, 8]" groups="[1, 2]">
  <resources vcpu="[2.5, 8]" memory="[32Gb, 150Gb]" disk="[100Gb, 1Tb]"/>
</nodes>

<admin version="4.0">

Admin version 4 is used for explicit control over the number of admin services running and whether these should run on dedicated nodes or on some existing container cluster in the application. In most cases, there is no need to specify this explicitly.

Sub-elements

Element	Quantity	Description
`<slobroks><nodes .../>`	0 or 1	Controls the nodes used for instance internal service location brokering
`<logservers><nodes dedicated='true' .../>`	0 or 1	Controls the node used as log server. At most 1 node can be configured.

<controllers>

Under content provides control over the nodes used as cluster controllers in this cluster on Vespa Cloud. If this element is not specified, 3 nodes from the content cluster are assigned as cluster controllers (from different groups if applicable). If this is specified, there is one mandatory sub-element, nodes.

Instance, environment and region variants

services.xml settings can be made to vary by instance, environment and region, see deployment variants.