Warm pools
A warm pool keeps a few subaccounts created and ready before you need them. When you deploy a new customer, Alien takes one from the pool instead of creating an account, so the deployment starts at once.
The slow part of a new account is rarely the account itself. A fresh AWS account or Google Cloud project starts with low quotas for compute, GPUs, and other services, and raising them can take the provider days. A pool requests those quotas ahead of time, so the wait happens before the customer signs, not after.
What a ready subaccount has
Each pool belongs to one connected cloud and one project. Its subaccounts are prepared for that project's stack:
- The account exists, inside your connected cloud.
- Alien's access to it is in place.
- The quotas the project's current release needs are requested, and approved where the provider allows.
When you choose New AWS subaccount under Where, the form shows Ready subaccount available when the pool has one. Alien gives it the name you chose and deploys into it. The pool then creates a replacement.
Set up a pool
Open the connected cloud under Subaccounts, then the project's warm pool:
- Keep this many accounts ready: the pool size.
- Create up to this many at a time: how fast the pool refills.
- Leave room for other accounts: how much of your account limit the pool must leave free, so it never uses the last slots.
A pool only refills while your account limit has room. When the limit is reached, or Alien can't read it, the pool waits and the connected cloud's page says why.
Azure has no warm pool. A resource group is created when you deploy, and its quotas are the subscription's.
Costs
A ready subaccount has no deployment in it, so it costs little or nothing to keep. It does count toward your account limit, and an AWS account you close still counts for 90 days. Keep the pool small: a few accounts cover most onboarding.
Next
- Quotas: account limits and the quotas inside each account.
- Subaccounts: deploy a customer.