Conflicting goals?

However, there are many scenarios where you actually want to limit the maximum amount of cpu used, even without contention. An example of this, is cloud deployments where you pay for cpu time and value price predictability over performance.

The cpu cgroup *also* allows one to set a maximum quota through the combination of the following knobs:

cpu.cfs_quota_us
cpu.cfs_period_us

If you define your quota as 50 % of your period, you will run for at most 50 % of the time. This is bandwidth based, in units of microseconds. So "use at most 2 cpus" is equivalent to 200 %. IOW, 2 seconds per second.
This is defaulted to -1, meaning "no upcap"

Equivalent mechanism exists for rt tasks: cpu.rt_quota_us, etc.

Cheers