Instance
A particular running or allocated occurrence of a service application virtual machine container or other resource.
Plain English
One concrete copy of a system component that is running or provisioned.
In context
Instance meaning depends on context and may refer to a process compute resource database installation or tenant-specific deployment so teams should name the resource precisely.
Example
“Traffic shifted away from the unhealthy service instance.”
When you'll hear this
- operations
- capacity planning
- incident response
Common misunderstanding
An instance is not always a physical server and multiple instances may share infrastructure.
Also known as
service instancecompute instance
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-27
