Live Resizing

Carolina Cloud containers support live resizing — you can increase or decrease vCPUs and RAM on a running instance without stopping it. This is useful for scaling up during compute-intensive jobs and scaling back down when they finish.

What can be resized

Resource	Live resize	Notes
vCPUs	Yes (containers only)	Takes effect immediately
RAM	Yes (containers only)	Takes effect immediately
Disk	Soft limit only	Database value updated; no live filesystem expansion

VMs do not support live resizing. To change a VM’s resources, you must delete and recreate it.

How to resize

Via the API:

curl -X PATCH https://console.carolinacloud.io/api/instance/<uuid>/ \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"n_vcpus": 32, "mem_gib": 128}'

You can update n_vcpus, mem_gib, or both in a single request.

Via the dashboard:

Use the resize controls on your instance card (coming soon).

Constraints

• The host machine must have sufficient free resources for the new allocation. If not, the resize will fail with a clear error.
• Resource limits: 1–256 vCPUs, 1–768 GiB RAM, 10–2,000 GiB disk.
• Billing adjusts immediately to reflect the new resource allocation.