Working with Flavors

A flavor is a named definition of certain server parameters such as the amount of RAM and disk space available. (There are other parameters set via the flavor, such as the amount of disk space and the number of virtual CPUs, but a discussion of those is too in-depth for a simple Getting Started Guide like this one.)

A Flavor object is generated from the Flavor() method on the Compute object:

$flavor = $compute->Flavor();

This is an empty flavor, and not very useful by itself. Normally, you'll retrieve a flavor by its ID:

$flavor = $compute->Flavor(2);

The ID can be either a full UUID or simply an integer (as shown above). The actual format will depend upon your cloud provider.

A list of flavors is provided by the FlavorList Collection object, which is generated by the FlavorList() method:

$flavors = $compute->FlavorList();
while($flavor = $flavors->Next())
    printf("Flavor %s has %dMB of RAM and %dGB of disk\n",
        $flavor->name, $flavor->ram, $flavor->disk);

Flavor details

By default, the FlavorList() method returns full details on all flavors. However, because of the overhead involved in retrieving all the details, this function can be slower than expected. You can supply an optional boolean parameter to the FlavorList() method to determine whether or not the flavor details are included:

$fastlist = $compute->FlavorList(FALSE); // name + id only
$slowlist = $compute->FlavorList(TRUE);  // include all details

Filtering flavors

The (optional) second parameter to the FlavorList() method is an associative array of filter parameters. See the List Flavors API call in the Next Generation Cloud Servers Developer Guide for a list of the available parameters.

For example, you may be only interested in flavors that have at least 4GB of memory:

$biglist = $compute->FlavorList(TRUE, array('minRam'=>4096));

Or perhaps only flavors that have at least 200GB of disk:

$biglist = $compute->FlavorList(TRUE, array('minDisk'=>200));

These filters can, of course, be combined:

$mylist = $compute->FlavorList(
    TRUE,
    array('minRam'=>4000, 'minDisk'=>200));

Examples

The file samples/compute/flavors.php has some examples of working with flavors.

What next?

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