Starting and managing

Modified: 09 Nov 2022 00:15 UTC

Before proceeding, you should request an account from your administrator.

Starting an instance from the portal

Watch a screencast of these instructions.

Login to the Triton Compute Service portal. From the Dashboard, click the Create Instance button, then select Infrastructure Container. Follow the prompts on the screen to select the base software image, the RAM, disk and CPU resources for your container, and set other details including the DNS names.

When finished, click the Launch button to create and start your container.

Once created, you will notice your container displayed in a grid within the Instances page of the Compute section. The container status will be indicated as either provisioning, running or stopped. If it is labeled as provisioning, the container is still being set up. When finished, your new container should be listed as running.

In order to access the container, you need the IP address. The primary IP address will be listed next to the container's name in your instances list. To get all of the IP addresses and other container details, click on the name of your new container. The IP addresses will be listed under Summary.

Watch the Demo

This video demo covers how to provision using the portal.

If you skipped ahead to the video, you can go back and review the written tutorial for step-by-step instructions.

Starting and managing an instance with Triton CLI

Install the Triton CLI tool to create an infrastructure container from the command line.

With triton installed and configured, we can provision infrastructure containers by running triton instance create. Here is an example of installing ubuntu:

triton instance create -w --name=ubuntu-server-1 ubuntu-16.04 g4-highcpu-128M
Creating instance ubuntu-server-1 (91e8aad0-0aac-4920-9689-84b3bc2031d6, ubuntu-16.04@20161004)
Created instance ubuntu-server-1 (91e8aad0-0aac-4920-9689-84b3bc2031d6) in 20s

This command has four parameters:

  1. We gave our container a name using --name=ubuntu-server-1
  2. We used -w to wait the container to be created.
  3. We used ubuntu-16.04 as our image.
  4. We set g4-highcpu-128M as our package. To list all available packages, run triton packages.

When an image is created, it will automatically be in a running state. To view all of your instances (Docker containers, infrastructure containers, and VMs), run triton instance list.

SHORTID   NAME                         IMG                    STATE    FLAGS  AGE
91e8aad0  ubuntu-server-1              ubuntu-16.04@20161004  running  -      5m

To get the IP address of your new container, run triton instance get with the container ID.

triton instance get 91e8aad0

The terminal will return a large list of infrastructure details. The IP address will be listed next to primaryIp.

Learn more about working with instances

Connecting to the container

SSH is the primary means of connecting and authenticating for commmand line access to all container types with the exception of Docker and Windows instances. You must have installed Triton CLI tool.

See detailed documentation for how to SSH into an instance from Max OS X or Windows.

Learn more about connecting to containers and VMs.

Removing the container

To remove an instance you're no longer using with triton CLI, execute triton instance delete <UUID>. That command can remove any instance, including Docker containers.

To remove an instance in the portal, get account access from your administraotr and access the instance section. Select the data center which hosts the container you wish to remove. Select the checkbox next to each container you wish to remove. From the actions drop down, select delete. You will be prompted to confirm: "Destroy the information on this instance and stop billing for this instance?"