You can’t really make them go idle, save by restarting them with a do-nothing command like tail -f /dev/null. What you probably want to do is scale a service down to 0. This leaves the declaration that you want to have an image deployed as a container, “but for right now, don’t stand any containers up”.
If you’re running a Kubernetes cluster, then this is pretty straightforward: just edit the deployment config for the service in question to set scale: 0. If you’re using Docker Compose, I believe the value to set is called replicas and the default is 1.
As for a limit to the number of running containers, I don’t think it exists unless you’re running an orchestrator like AWS EKS that sets an artificial limit of… 15 per node? I think? Generally you’re limited only by the resources availabale, which means it’s a good idea to make sure that you’re setting limits on the amount of RAM/CPU a container can use.
You can’t really make them go idle, save by restarting them with a do-nothing command like
tail -f /dev/null
. What you probably want to do is scale a service down to 0. This leaves the declaration that you want to have an image deployed as a container, “but for right now, don’t stand any containers up”.If you’re running a Kubernetes cluster, then this is pretty straightforward: just edit the deployment config for the service in question to set
scale: 0
. If you’re using Docker Compose, I believe the value to set is calledreplicas
and the default is1
.As for a limit to the number of running containers, I don’t think it exists unless you’re running an orchestrator like AWS EKS that sets an artificial limit of… 15 per node? I think? Generally you’re limited only by the resources availabale, which means it’s a good idea to make sure that you’re setting limits on the amount of RAM/CPU a container can use.