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Cloud Computing

Definition

Cloud computing is a technology that allows users to access computing resources, such as servers, storage, and applications, over the Internet without the need for on-site hardware or infrastructure.

That enables users to scale their computing resources up or down as needed and pay only for their use. It also allows for greater flexibility, mobility, and collaboration. In addition, users can access their data and applications anywhere with an Internet connection.

Cloud computing is used by businesses, individuals, and organizations of all sizes across all industries to increase agility, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Service Models

Explained

Cloud service models refer to how cloud computing services are delivered to users. The three main cloud service models are:

Cloud service models deliver diverse solutions that enable access to software, development platforms, and virtualized infrastructure through the cloud, enhancing organizational flexibility and scalability while reducing the burden of direct IT infrastructure management.

Software as a Service (SaaS):

SaaS delivers ready-to-use applications over the internet, eliminating the need for users to install, maintain, or manage underlying infrastructure while offering cost-effective scalability and flexibility through browser or app-based access.

Platform as a Service (PaaS):

PaaS provides developers a complete cloud-based environment containing all necessary tools, frameworks, and infrastructure to build, test, and deploy applications without managing the underlying systems. It allows them to focus exclusively on development while benefiting from built-in scalability and collaborative capabilities.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):

IaaS provides users with virtualized computing resources (servers, storage, and networking) delivered over the cloud, where the provider manages the physical hardware. In contrast, users retain complete control over the configuration and management of these virtual resources, offering flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency without hardware investment.

Deployment Models

Explained

The three most commonly used cloud deployment models are:

Cloud deployment models represent distinct strategies for implementing cloud computing services—whether through public, private, or hybrid infrastructures—each providing a carefully calibrated balance of accessibility, control, security, and cost-efficiency customized to meet an organization’s unique operational needs.

Public Cloud

A Public Cloud is a computing model in which the service provider owns, manages, and maintains the physical infrastructure, such as data centers, servers, networking equipment, and storage. Users access virtualized computing, networking, and storage resources as services that can be quickly and easily provisioned and scaled as needed.

Public Cloud is accessible over the internet and is typically offered on a pay-per-use basis. It allows organizations to avoid the costs and complexities of managing their hardware and infrastructure and instead focus on their core business needs.

Private Cloud

A Private Cloud is a computing model in which the cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization. The infrastructure can be on-premises or on a public cloud, such as a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and is owned, managed, and operated by the organization or the cloud provider.

Private Cloud provides organizations greater control and security over their data and infrastructure and can be customized to meet their business needs.

Hybrid Cloud

A Hybrid Cloud is a computing model in which an organization’s on-premises private and third-party public clouds are connected as a single, flexible infrastructure. This allows organizations to leverage the features and benefits of both public and private clouds and move workloads between them as needed.

As a result, the Hybrid cloud provides organizations with greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency while allowing them to maintain control over their data and infrastructure.

Scenarios

Use Cases - IaaS

The essence of these three models represents a progression of cloud adoption maturity: from simply relocating existing systems (Lift & Shift), to partially modernizing while migrating (Improve & Move), to fully embracing cloud-native principles with complete redesign and automation (Design & Build).

Lift & Shift

One speaks of Lift & Shift when moving existing, traditional workloads into an IaaS cloud, as unaltered as possible, is unavoidable. Management Tools for IT Operations are, as far as possible, supported by the existing Data Center Operation, taken over, and implemented. Cloud-native functions have little or no application.

Improve & Move

One speaks of Improve & Move if you adapt and modify IT processes in this approach to at least partially take advantage of cloud-native functions. You should use the migration process to achieve more substantial standardization, a higher degree of automation, and the freedom of existing processes from legacy burdens.

Design & Build

One speaks of Design & Build if you redefine all or most new business and IT processes. Further, you use agile, cloud-native methods in your development wherever possible. The tools used throughout the application life cycle are cloud-native and DevOps-oriented, focusing strongly on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation.

History

Overview

Why Exoscale?

Exoscale is a European cloud provider focused on simplicity, sustainability, and sovereignty. Looking closely, you can see 12 more reasons Exoscale is a good fit for your requirements.

When running mission-critical production workloads in the cloud, a partner you can rely on makes all the difference.

Exoscale’s Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS)

Managed Kubernetes is a strong reason to choose Exoscale and reduce the complexity of running containerized applications.

Unique Selling Points

Exoscale

A European cloud provider that combines exceptional performance with cost-effectiveness. A transparent pricing model and a commitment to legal compliance distinguish it.

European

We have chosen the most secure data centers in the heart of Europe to grant you performance and uncompromised safety.

Performant

• Single Score - CPU Performance *
• Multi Score - System Performance (transparent bars) *

cloud-mercato.com

Affordable

All instance prices are taken from the vendors’ webpage regarding European data center zones with on-demand availability and a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Transparent

Resources are charged by the second at a consistent rate everywhere. There are no upfront costs or long-term contracts. You can use resources on demand, adjust usage without extra fees, and pay only for what you use.

• Local SSD: is billed 0.00014 USD/GiB/hour
• Internal Traffic: is FREE
• Inbound Traffic: is FREE
• Outbound Traffic: is billed 0.02 USD/GiB/hour beyond the Free Tier
• Free Tier: is up to 1.42 GiB/hour/instance ~ 1 TiB/month/instance

Our standard instances offer a balanced combination of CPU, RAM, and SSD storage to suit different needs and support your setups.

Here is an overview of our pricing scheme for standard compute instances:

More instance types can be found here: exoscale.com/pricing/

Compliant

• Your cloud data processing and storing with Exoscale is fully GDPR-compliant.
• The Exoscale Cloud is not impacted by the US Cloud Act.

Compliance

GDPR vs CLOUD Act

EU GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is focused on protecting personal data and is valid for all companies operating in the EU. There are fines for non-compliance.

US CLOUD Act

The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act) defines the handing over personal data to the US government if requested and applies to all US-owned companies. There are fines or prison for non-compliance.

NOTE! GDPR non-compliance fines are up to €20.000.000 or 4% of your company’s global turnover.

Exoscale’s Compliance Frameworks

Exoscale’s Compliance Web

Full compliance with global and local security frameworks, certified by the world’s most stringent auditors, to enable smooth and safe adoption of our cloud platform by SaaS providers and enterprises in every sector.

exoscale.com/compliance/

Exoscale’s Compliance Center

Exoscale is committed to helping our customers comply with industry and government regulations. Our Compliance Center contains all the information you need about our compliance posture.

This includes information about our security controls, policies, procedures, certificates, attestations, and compliance reports. We will continue to update this center as our compliance posture evolves. If you have any questions about our compliance posture or would like more information, please contact:

support@exoscale.com

Community

Exoscale Documentation

Explore how to utilize Exoscale’s services with our Documentation. community.exoscale.com/

The overall content is organized into six categories:

• Platform
• Product
• Reference
• Academy
• Tutorial
• Tool

Product

The Product category gives an overview of all that the Exoscale platform offers.

Category

You find products within the category. For example, the COMPUTE category has two products: Instances and Containers (SKS).

Product

Each product documentation follows the same structure, so the desired information can be found more quickly by intuitively browsing it without using the search function.

Five topic sections are defined for each product:

• Quick Start - Comprehensive guide for getting started quickly.
• Overview - Product descriptions, architectures, and details.
• Operation - Life cycle management, maintenance, and upgrades.
• How-To - Step-by-step guide to accomplish specific tasks.
• Reference - Overview of internal and external references.

Section

Quick Start was already a well-established section. If you are using a new product for the first time, this is the starting point in the documentation.

Integrations

Available for Exoscale

We use DevOps and Automation Tools and support them.

Container Orchestration

Cloud-native tools embrace containers as a great way to build, ship, and run applications.

Kubernetes

One of the most active open-source projects, Kubernetes, or k8s for short, offers container cluster management with robust yet simple concepts. Exoscale provides a managed Kubernetes offering.

Cloud Controller Manager

The Kubernetes Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) implementation for Exoscale. This component enables a tighter integration of Kubernetes clusters with the Exoscale Compute platform.

NGINX Ingress Controller

The official way of deploying the NGINX Ingress Controller on Exoscale.

Configuration Management and Automation

As DevOps ourselves, we use automation and configuration management tools every day. On our platform, you will have access to the best tools available.

Terraform

Written in GO, Terraform enables you to configure the full spectrum of your infrastructure from compute instances to their DNS entries. It takes your infrastructure and makes it converge toward its desired configuration state.

Packer

The Exoscale Packer builder plugin can be used to build Exoscale instance templates.

Vault

The Vault plugin enables a secret backend for Exoscale. This plugin generates Exoscale IAM API keys, which can be restricted to specific operations according to predefined roles.

Pulumi

Pulumi, an open-source IaC tool, helps you build, deploy, and manage cloud applications and infrastructure. It allows easier collaboration and reduces cloud complexity.

Crossplane

Crossplane is a cloud-native control plane framework that allows users to easily build control planes without writing code. VSHN provides the integration on the Marketplace.

Clients and Libraries

We support some of the best clients. Follow the link to learn how to integrate your workflow with the Exoscale cloud platform.

Traefik

Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that easily integrates with your existing infrastructure components and runs smoothly on Exoscale.

CLI

An easy-to-use CLI interface in Golang lets you browse and control all Exoscale resources.

Egoscale

Egoscale is the official Go wrapper for the Exoscale public cloud API. It powers our CLI and many other Go-based libraries and integrations, like Kubernetes External DNS or Docker Machine.

Python

The official Python wrapper for the Exoscale API.

Lego

Lego is an ACME library and standalone application written in Go. It lets you automate ACME challenges and certificate deployments on Exoscale, eventually using our DNS service.

Third-party Platform Integrations

Discover how to integrate our cloud services with some great third-party platforms.

GuruSquad

GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise provides enterprise-class unstructured data backup, migration, and replication. Whether the data is being migrated from another cloud provider or on-premise, GuruSquad can simplify all the data migration and backup jobs from a single pane of glass.

Nuvla.io

Nuvla.io, by technology partner Sixsq, is an edge-to-cloud application deployment platform. With a real edge and multi-cloud solution built on open-source software, Nuvla.io can repeatedly deploy simple to complex containerized applications with orchestration.

Object Storage Extensions

Using this set of certified tools with SOS, you can browse, backup, or map object storage from various OSs and environments.

Cyberduck

This free software provides a versatile GUI for S3-compatible transfers and Duck, a CLI tool for power users. Both are available on Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms.

Flexify.IO

Flexify.IO is a great way to migrate data to and from on-premises or other cloud storage to Exoscale Object Storage. Flexify.IO does the magic - and optimizes traffic and bandwidth on the way.

CloudBerry

CloudBerry provides an extensive palette of tools for integrating Object Storage with Windows. You can browse storage, map a drive like a simple share, or back up your complete OS and application.

References

Overview

CERN - powered by Exoscale

Scientific computing at scale.

• Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) initiative
• Exoscale provided 10,000 CPU cores
• An environment for 1.7 million scientists
• Storing, sharing, analyzing, and reusing research data

whalebone - powered by Exoscale

Keep the malware out.

• Malware Defense
• Elasticsearch Cluster & Log Processing
• Backups and Data Storage
• Servers are dynamically started on demand

SchoolFox - powered by Exoscale

Safe and compliant school communication.

• Communication between teachers and parents
• Re-platformed to Exoscale
• GDPR was a critical factor in the move
• PaaS to IaaS move

IaaS+

Overview

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the cloud service model we support with the Exoscale platform and a bit more, hence IaaS+.

The following questions:

• Why IaaS?
• Who uses IaaS?
• Why Exoscale?

we should look into based on the breadth of the cloud offerings in the market today.

Why IaaS?

It is the cloud computing model to extend or replace your data center. Let’s look at the trends of the worldwide IT infrastructure market.

The IDC figures show clearly that the infrastructure game is changing. Even though there are still markets where cloud adoption is low and slow, there is a clear trend that the public cloud will be a significant part of IT infrastructure.

By 2028:

• private cloud (cloud & dedicated) share will grow from 15.7% to 16.9%
• public cloud (cloud & shared) part will be up from 49.0% to 58.1%
• on-premises part (non-cloud & dedicated) will be down from 35.3% to 25.0%

Who uses IaaS?

IaaS users, in general, are looking for TWO significant benefits:

• More dynamic, servers can be started and stopped as needed without the up-front cost.
• Reduced complexity, such as buying, repairing, or dealing with physical hardware.

IaaS Exoscale Users

Which audiences apply IaaS functions to solve their IT tasks?

Why Exoscale?

• Trusted by engineers across Europe and beyond - A reliable partner is key for mission-critical cloud workloads. Our customer success engineers have supported hundreds of European clients in migrating, running, and scaling cloud-native applications.
• Data security, GDPR compliance & data privacy laws - We prioritize security. Exoscale ensures compliance with strict Swiss data privacy laws. Workloads started in Austria or Germany remain there, guaranteeing GDPR compliance.
• Not your typical Swiss cloud hosting company - Though primarily known as a Swiss cloud provider, we’ve expanded our data centers to Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria.
• More than Swiss, Austrian, and German data centers - We’ve assisted numerous European customers in seamlessly migrating and scaling workloads across Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and beyond. With ISO27001, Cloud Security Alliance, and ISO27018 certifications, we simplify due diligence and focus on delivering top-tier infrastructure for your applications.

Exoscale for public and private cloud

Exoscale provides building blocks for deployment/delivery models with classic cloud computing instances (VMs, virtual machines) or dedicated cloud servers in a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) format, depending on your computing and compliance needs.

Our Data Centers

A data center near you in Europe featuring:

• Multi-homed locations
• Several peering connections​
• Internal 400 Gbps backbone
• GDPR-compliant

Exoscale Interfaces

Our simple and intuitive interfaces make powerful concepts easy for teams of any size. Easily use anti-affinity groups and spawn virtual servers in different data centers to ensure high availability. Securely configure firewall rules across any number of instances using security groups. Manage team members and control access to your infrastructure with organization, keypairs, and multi-factor authentication.

Powerful concepts. Simple interfaces. Built for teams.

Exoscale Web UI

All the platform components/features are automatable via various methods, such as the Exoscale CLI, Terraform plugins, the OpenAPI, and IAM-Key configurations. Support for creating and using custom templates is available to regularly reuse more complex machine configurations.

Exoscale CLI

Exoscale Platform

A state-of-the-art IaaS platform providing the building blocks for your application infrastructure.

Exoscale Portal

The product categories available on the Exoscale Portal are:

In the following section, we will dive into the details of each category.

Compute

Details

`Exoscale offers a range of products related to cloud servers, also known as virtual machines or Compute Instances. These products allow users to easily manage virtual machines, create instance pools, and ensure fault tolerance through anti-affinity groups. SKS and Block Storage options provide scalability, increased computational power, and storage flexibility. IAM and organization management tools allow for secure access control and user management. With various networking products available, users can configure workloads to meet their specific requirements, including secure private networking, firewall management, Network Load Balancer, Elastic IP addresses, and IPv6 support.

Exoscale’s cloud infrastructure is simple, fast-performing, and can scale with businesses’ needs. Overall, Exoscale offers a comprehensive and flexible cloud computing platform suitable for organizations of all sizes and industries.

NOTE! Here, you can find all the details in the online documentation for COMPUTE.

Instances

For better requirement matching, various instance types are available to use:

• Standard: Provide a balanced mix of CPU cores, RAM, and SSD local storage to cover a variety of use cases and allow you to implement your architecture.
• CPU Optimized: These are optimized for CPU-intensive applications, offering a higher CPU-to-memory ratio. They offer a more significant computational advantage for workloads like batch processing, media decoding and encoding, network appliances, or high-performance web servers.
• Memory Optimized: These are the best performance-to-cost ratio for memory-intensive workloads and are ideal for RAM-intensive applications. They double the memory per core with a price reduction of up to almost 25 % compared to Standard Instances.
• Storage Optimized: These are the same mix of CPU and RAM as our Standard Instances but use larger drives, greatly expanding the overall data capacity. Consequently, they lower the cost per GB by more than 60 %.
• GPU Tesla P100: Provides up to 4 dedicated NVIDIA Tesla P100 graphic cards to perform deep learning, high-performance computing, or other types of intensive computation. Save up to 75% compared to the competition, and no long-term commitment.
• GPU Tesla V100: Based on Tesla V100, offers nearly double single-precision and double-precision teraflops compared to GPU1, as well as 640 dedicated Tensor Cores to train AI models that would consume weeks of computing resources in a few days.
• GPU A40: This is the all-rounder for AR, VR, Simulations, Rendering, AI, and more. Combining the latest Ampere RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and CUDA Cores with 48 GB of graphics memory allows the A40 to deliver unique visual computing workloads.
• GPU A5000: Built on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture featuring 64 RT Cores, 256 Tensor Cores, 8,192 CUDA cores, and 24GB of graphics memory for exceptional performance in rendering, AI, and compute tasks. It excels in demanding workloads, including 3D rendering, video editing, scientific visualization, and immersive virtual reality experiences.
• GPU GeForce RTX 3080 Ti: Powered by Ampere architecture, it features 10,240 CUDA cores and 12GB GDDR6X memory at 19 Gbps for exceptional performance. It supports real-time ray tracing and AI-driven enhancements with dedicated RT and Tensor cores for lifelike graphics and efficient deep learning. It has PCIe 4.0 and a Resizable BAR for optimal bandwidth and efficiency across workloads.

Instance Pools

Exoscale Instance Pools are a service to provision groups of identical Compute instances automatically. You can define a number of instances in the pool and the service will keep the required number up and running for you in order to achieve:

• High Availability: using an Instance Pool ensures that the target quantity of instances is running.
• Elasticity: Instance Pools can be scaled up and down dynamically, so the number of instances matches the actual load for better cost efficiency.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Instance Pools.

SKS (Scalable Kubernetes Service)

Exoscale’s SKS is a managed Kubernetes offering, which consists of:

• Managed Kubernetes control planes
• Dynamic Nodepool attachment
• Control Plane access management facilities
• Full API support

Exoscale’s Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS) provides a powerful and efficient way to quickly deploy and manage your applications. With this fully managed K8s service, you can quickly scale up and down your worker nodes and have complete control over the entire life cycle of your cluster.

Exoscale provides various integration options, including CLI, API, portal, Terraform support, and deep NLB integration.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on SKS.

Block Storage

Exoscale’s Block Storage offers a robust and distributed block device solution for Exoscale Compute instances, known for its redundancy and reliability. A Volume, a singular storage unit, can be partitioned and formatted to accommodate directories and files. One of the critical features of Block Storage is the Snapshot, which captures the state of a volume at a specific moment, allowing users to create new volumes based on that state.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Block Storage.

Custom Templates

Exoscale provides various Compute instance templates from which to choose. However, you can customize templates to suit your needs further. In addition to using a Cloud-Init configuration via an instance’s user data or a configuration management tool such as Puppet, Ansible, or Terraform, you can also create customized templates. You can use custom templates to launch a custom operating system or custom template configuration on Exoscale, which allows you to deploy ready-to-go instances with minimal startup configuration.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Custom Templates.

Security Groups

Exoscale Security Groups provide a modular way to define and compose firewall rules. The rules are managed at the hypervisor level to restrict incoming and outgoing network traffic.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Security Groups.

Elastic IP

All Exoscale instances include a native IPv4 address leased from a global pool. This address is strongly coupled to the Compute instance itself. When you destroy the instance, you release the IP address to the global pool without guarantee that you will ever get the same IP address again. However, there are various cases where you may want an IP address to persist. By creating an Elastic IP, you can have a specific IP address for your organization. You can then attach it to one or several instances besides their native IP address.

The simplest use case for this feature is to use an Elastic IP as a persistent IP address you can move between instances. This allows you to circumvent the IP address change when destroying an instance. You can always switch the underlying instance and point traffic to the same address with an Elastic IP.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Elastic IPs.

Load Balancers

A Network Load Balancer (or NLB) is a Layer-4 (TCP/UDP) load balancer that distributes incoming traffic to Compute instances managed by an Instance Pool. An NLB comprises several services, each bound to an Instance Pool in the same zone as the NLB. Services will efficiently forward connections reaching the NLB’s IP address to the member instances of the Instance Pool.

While the instances remain individually accessible through their public IP, the NLB will expose a single IP address for all services and distribute the incoming traffic across the members of the Instance Pool following the service’s rules. NLB services will update automatically when the Instance Pool scales up or down, distributing traffic across all reachable member instances of the pool and excluding unreachable ones using an integrated health check functionality.

NLB acts only on incoming traffic, so all return traffic from the backend to the client that originated the request goes out directly from the pool member instance.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Network Load Balancer.

Private Networks

The Private Network is a classic layer-2 segment: it is as if your instances were attached to a dedicated switch. This means:

• You can use any ethernet-compatible protocol (IPv4, IPv6, NetBIOS).
• Security group rules do not apply to traffic inside private networks.
• Multicast and broadcast are authorized.
• Only your instances are attached to the segment.
• No encryption is performed, but your packets do not leave our data center.
• Private Networks can be managed.
• Private Networks do not span across several zones.

Each instance may provision one or more additional unmanaged and managed network interfaces. This interface is bound to a private network segment shared only with your other instances.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Private Networks.

SSH Keypairs

SSH keypairs can authenticate to your Compute instances running Linux without a password, leveraging SSH Public-Key authentication’s added security. Public-key authentication is both:

• Secure: Breaking an SSH key requires so much time and computational power that these attacks are impractical in the real world. SSH keys are much more secure than even very strong passwords.
• Convenient: Instead of managing per-instance passwords or sharing them across your organization, every person who needs access to your servers gives you their public key. You can then set up granular access control by adding those keys only to the relevant instances. Suppose you need to revoke someone’s access. In that case, simply revoking their key prevents them from logging in without affecting other people’s workflow.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on SSH Keypairs.

Anti-Affinity

Anti-affinity groups let you specify which instances should run on separate hosts. For example, in an HA (high availability) cluster, you could keep your instances on distinct hypervisors to ensure more reliable fault tolerance.

NOTE! Here, you can find more details on Anti-Affinity Groups.

Object Storage

Details

In today’s digital landscape, efficient data storage and content delivery are crucial for businesses looking to optimize performance and user experience. Exoscale addresses these needs with its robust Simple Object Storage (SOS) and powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions. Designed to handle vast amounts of data easily, Exoscale’s SOS provides secure and scalable object storage with multiple redundancy features tailored for seamless integration with existing systems. Complementing this, Exoscale’s CDN, developed in partnership with Ducksify and leveraging Akamai’s global network, ensures fast and reliable content distribution worldwide. These services offer a comprehensive approach to data management and asset delivery, helping businesses achieve efficiency and reliability.

SOS

Exoscale’s Simple Object Storage (SOS) is a scalable and cost-effective solution for storing and managing large amounts of data. It offers highly available multi-redundant storage, ensuring data safety and accessibility. You can store various files and objects, such as assets, backups, and media files. Your data remains in the exact location you store it, and Exoscale replicates it in at least three physical copies for maximum safety.

Features Overview:

• S3 compatible
• Direct HTTP/S access
• Metadata support
• ACL and CORS support
• For any data
• Pay for what you use
• Free inbound traffic

The S3-compatible API allows for easy integration with existing workflows and applications. SOS provides low-latency, high-bandwidth, and secure HTTP(s) access, allowing fast and secure data management from any location. You can enhance this with Exoscale’s CDN integration.

NOTE! Here, you can find all the details in the online documentation for OBJECT STORAGE.

CDN

Exoscale’s CDN service, developed with Ducksify, makes distributing your assets globally with Akamai’s delivery network simple. It improves performance and user experience by caching assets in multiple locations. You can easily integrate it with our SOS service to make content available through the CDN endpoint.

Features Overview:

• Modern protocol support
• World-class delivery availability
• Improved download completion rates
• Leveraging the Akamai Intelligent Platform
• QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) support
• Enable on your SOS bucket
• Volume-based pricing
• Powered by Ducksify

The CDN offers predictable pricing and is a reliable solution for enhancing your application’s performance.

NOTE! Here, you can find all the details in the online documentation for CDN.

DBaaS

Details

Exoscale’s end-to-end encrypted database as a service (DBaaS) is a powerful solution for businesses to host their data and databases in the cloud securely. With this service, users can start within minutes, making it easy to quickly deploy and manage their databases without any delays or downtime. In addition, Exoscale’s DBaaS offering is entirely GDPR-compliant, ensuring businesses can meet regulatory requirements and keep their data safe and secure. Furthermore, as a fully managed service, Exoscale takes care of all the maintenance and management of the databases, allowing users to focus on their core business activities.

Features Overview:

• Full lifecycle management
• Termination protection
• Automatic backup policy
• Available in all zones
• Dedicated instances

Finally, Exoscale’s DBaaS offering supports a wide range of open-source databases, allowing users to choose the best database and providing a robust and secure solution for businesses that host their data and databases in the cloud.

DBaaS Overview

Managed PostgreSQL

Often called Postgres, it is an advanced, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Renowned for its robustness, performance, and extensive feature set, it supports complex queries, transactions, and advanced data types. PostgreSQL is highly extensible and standards-compliant with SQL. Due to its reliability, data integrity, and concurrency features, it is widely used in various environments, from small-scale applications to large-scale enterprise systems. Additionally, it supports numerous programming languages and can handle massive amounts of data efficiently.

Managed MySQL

It is a widely used, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) known for its speed, reliability, and ease of use. MySQL, developed by Oracle Corporation, supports standard SQL and provides a powerful, flexible, scalable database management solution. It is commonly used for web applications, often in conjunction with PHP, due to its integration with various platforms and ability to handle large volumes of data efficiently. MySQL offers strong support for transactional processing, data replication, and security, making it a popular choice for developers and enterprises seeking robust database performance.

Managed Kafka

The Apache Software Foundation developed an open-source stream-processing platform. It is designed to build real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Kafka efficiently handles high-throughput, low-latency data transfer and can process millions of messages per second. It operates as a distributed system that ensures fault tolerance and scalability. Kafka’s core components—producers, consumers, brokers, topics, and partitions—enable the reliable streaming and storage of data across various systems. It is widely used for log aggregation, event sourcing, real-time analytics, and integrating disparate systems.

Managed OpenSearch

It is an open-source search and analytics engine derived initially from Elasticsearch and maintained by the OpenSearch community and Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides capabilities for indexing, searching, and analyzing large volumes of data in real-time. OpenSearch is designed to be scalable, highly available, and secure, supporting full-text search, structured search, and complex data analysis. It includes OpenSearch Dashboards for data visualization, enabling users to create interactive charts, graphs, and dashboards. OpenSearch is widely used in log and event data analysis, monitoring, and business intelligence applications.

Managed Valkey

It is an open-source, Redis-compatible, in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. Known for its high performance, it supports various data structures such as strings, lists, sets, hashes, and more. It offers sub-millisecond latency, making it ideal for real-time applications like caching, session management, and analytics. Managed Valkey includes features like replication, persistence, and clustering to ensure reliability and scalability. Its versatility and efficiency make it popular for developers aiming to improve application speed and responsiveness.

Managed Grafana

It is an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that allows users to visualize, analyze, and alert on data from multiple sources. Known for its customizable and interactive dashboards, Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch. It provides powerful query capabilities, real-time alerting, and flexible visualization options like graphs, heatmaps, and histograms. Commonly used for monitoring system performance, application metrics, and business KPIs, Grafana helps teams make data-driven decisions by providing clear, comprehensive insights into their data.

NOTE! Here, you can find all the details in the online documentation for DBAAS.

DNS

Details

Exoscale’s cloud-native DNS provides a powerful solution for businesses looking to take complete control of their DNS and automate deployments. With Exoscale’s DNS, users can easily manage new records and zones, giving them full control over their infrastructure. Exoscale’s DNS is also built on an anycast network, providing low-latency resolution for users worldwide. This ensures users can access their applications quickly and easily without delays or interruptions.

Features Overview:

• All common records available
• GEO replication
• Easy redirects
• ALIAS support
• Anycast DNS
• Per zone pricing
• Powered by DNSimple
• Easily integrate with Let’s Encrypt

Exoscale’s DNS also offers geo-replicated redundancy, providing optimal uptime and ensuring that users’ applications are always available, even in a failure. Overall, Exoscale’s cloud-native DNS is a robust and reliable solution for businesses looking to manage their DNS and ensure the availability of their applications.

NOTE! Here, you can find all the details in the online documentation for DNS.

IAM

Details

Exoscale provides various interaction methods with its platform, including programmatic access via the command line, your preferred programming language, integrations with third-party tools, and a user-friendly web portal. Regardless of the method, Identity and Access Management (IAM) will define permissions and actions for individuals and services on your platform.

IAM is composed of 2 primary building blocks:

• Roles act as a container for a single policy and add some options.
• Policies are rules describing what can and cannot be done.

IAM Keys

Exoscale IAM, or Identity and Access Management, is a system that manages access to resources within the Exoscale cloud environment. Exoscale is a cloud service provider that offers various services, including compute, storage, and network solutions.

Exoscale IAM enables administrators to control who has access to specific resources, manage user permissions, and enforce security policies. Here are some key features and functions of Exoscale IAM:

• User Management
• Roles and Policies
• Access Control
• Security and Compliance
• API Access

Using Exoscale IAM, organizations can effectively safeguard their cloud resources, comply with regulatory requirements, and streamline user access management, ultimately enhancing the security and efficiency of their cloud operations.

IAM Users

So far, IAM has allowed you to create keys that could be restricted and fine-tuned according to their permissions. While practical and powerful, IAM Keys have always been intended for programmatic usage, while users could not be limited in scope beyond the predefined roles:

• Owner
• Tech
• Billing (former Admin)

Now, we are enhancing the IAM functionality, bringing the same powerful features to organizations’ users and offering more control and flexibility. This means you can now limit a user’s scope of action in the web portal like you would for an IAM Key, with precise and fine-grained IAM Roles.

Typical use cases include:

• give a user read-only access
• generally, fine-tune what a user can see or do in the web portal

It is important to note that:

• All new organizations will immediately start with IAM users
• All existing organizations will be migrated

NOTE! Here, you can find all the details in the online documentation for IAM.

Marketplace

Details

• Scale up your applications
• Access a curated collection of solution templates
• Leverage ready-to-use managed services

Web

The complete marketplace portfolio with descriptions can be found here: exoscale.com/marketplace

Portal

The tightly integrated marketplace products are easy to reach in the product portal: portal.exoscale.com/marketplace

NOTE! You need to be logged in to your portal account!

Organization

Overview

In this section of the Portal, you find:

• Billing
• Credit Cards
• Invoices
• Subscriptions
• Audit-Trail
• Quotas
• Legal

Billing

Billing Details

The organization display name is used for invoices. It must be between 4 and 225 characters, cannot be composed of only numbers, and cannot be a UUID. It is not currently possible to modify the country associated with your organization. Please get in touch with support if you need assistance. It is not currently possible to change your organization’s VAT number.

Credit Threshold

You will receive an email notification when your credit balance drops below the specified threshold, set by default to 15 CHF/EUR/USD. To avoid service disruptions, check your balance regularly for your consumption needs.

Usage Overview & Detail

Usage Overview: outlines your consumption for a specific time frame and your current billing mode. If your billing mode is set to Post-Paid, you will receive an invoice based on your monthly consumption, and your default credit card will be charged for the due amount.

Usage Detail: provides itemized views of your consumption for the same time frame stated under Usage Overview.

Billing Mode

Post-Paid: You will receive an invoice based on your consumption every month. Your default credit card will then be charged for the due amount. To activate the Post-Paid billing mode, you need to meet the following requirements:

• Your account must be older than 90 days
• All your invoices must be paid
• You need to have a saved credit card and set it as the default

Wire-Transfer: You will receive an invoice based on your consumption every month. You have 30 days to pay your invoice by wire transfer.

NOTE! The Wire-Transfer billing mode is activated upon request after a case-by-case examination.

Redeem Coupon

If you have a promotional coupon, you can redeem it by entering the code in the Coupon Code field.

Credit Cards

It is the location for determining which credit card is associated with the organization. Our payment processing partner, Adyen, safely stores credit card details.

Invoices

You can look up all your invoices in excellent tabular form (Invoice Number, Total, Emission Date, Due Date, Status, Actions). Clicking on the table headers enables a different sorted view of the invoices.

Subscriptions

It is the location where you can view and manage your DNS Zones and Support Plans subscriptions in excellent tabular form.

Audit-Trail

You can see all the tracked security-relevant user activity and API usage here. The tool allows you to list and search for events that interact with Exoscale resources.

Quotas

Is the location where you can view and manage quotas on the following specific resources:

• Instances
• Custom Templates
• Snapshots
• GPUs
• SKS Clusters
• Elastic IPs
• Private Networks
• Network Load Balancers
• IAM Access Keys
• DBaaS Services
• Object Storage Buckets
• Block Storage Volumes
• Block Storage cumulative size (GiB)
• Max size of a Block Storage Volume (GiB)

Legal

It is structured into two Tabs:

• Terms: Here, you find the Legal Documents for your organization, including the Terms & Conditions you excepted and when and the version of the Data Processing Addendum you excepted and when.

• Compliance Center: Exoscale is committed to helping our customers comply with industry and government regulations. Our Compliance Center contains all the information you need about our compliance posture, including information about our security controls, policies, procedures, certificates, attestations, and compliance reports. We will continue to update this center as our compliance posture evolves. For some of the reports, a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) is necessary, which can be done by clicking the REVIEW AND ACCEPT button.

Support

Overview

In this section of the Portal, you can view and manage your support tickets by status (All, New, Waiting, Open, Closed). Exoscale’s support services are designed to cater to various customer needs, from developers and testers to enterprises running critical workloads. Here’s a breakdown of what each support plan includes:

Built-In Support

It is included for all customers at no additional cost. It is ideal for testers, developers, and non-critical applications.

• Initial Response Time: Best-effort
• Support Hours: Office Hours
• Limited Audit Trail: 1 month of mutation events
• Limited Monthly Usage Reports: Aggregated by resource type
• Ticket Support

Starter Plan

It is suited for startups and SMEs running production infrastructures. It includes everything in the Built-In plan plus additional features.

• Initial Response Time: 4 hours
• Support Hours: Office Hours
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Limited Audit Trail: 1 month of mutation events
• Monthly Usage Reports: Reporting per resource
• Ticket Support

Price: 100.00 EUR/CHF/USD per month

Pro Plan

It is tailored for companies running sensitive production infrastructures. It includes everything from the Starter plan, faster response times, and event tracking.

• Initial Response Time: 1 hour
• Support Hours: Extended Office Hours
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Comprehensive Audit Trail: All API traffic, retention at customer discretion
• Monthly Usage Reports: Reporting per resource
• Ticket Support
• Phone Support

Price: 500.00 EUR/CHF/USD per month

Enterprise Plan

It is designed for companies running critical workloads. It offers the highest level of support and the fastest response times.

• Initial Response Time: 30 minutes (24/7)
• Support Hours: 24/7
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Comprehensive Audit Trail: All API traffic, retention at customer discretion
• Monthly Usage Reports: Reporting per resource
• Dedicated Customer Success Manager
• Custom Compliance Form
• Ticket Support
• Phone Support

Price: 5% of IaaS consumption (minimum 2,500 EUR/CHF/USD per month)

Support Features & Plans

*) 5% of IaaS consumption (minimum 2500 EUR/CHF/USD per month)

Additional Information

• Office Hours: Mon-Fri, 8 am to 6 pm CET/CEST
• Office Hours+: Mon-Fri, 7 am to 8 pm CET/CEST
• PEN-Testing & Right to Audit: Available across all plans

By choosing the right support plan, you can ensure that your needs are met effectively and promptly, allowing you to focus on what matters most—growing your business.

NOTE! Here, you can find details on the case priority schema in the online documentation for SUPPORT.

Cloud-Native

Explained

Cloud-native refers to a software development approach that leverages cloud computing services and infrastructure to build and deploy applications. It involves designing applications as a collection of microservices that can run independently and scale dynamically, using containerization and orchestration technologies like Kubernetes.

Cloud-native applications are built to be resilient, scalable, and highly available and are often deployed using automated continuous delivery pipelines.

Why Cloud-Native?

Scalability

Cloud-native applications are designed to scale dynamically, allowing organizations to handle increased traffic and demand without downtime or performance issues.

Agility

Cloud-native applications can be developed, tested, and deployed quickly, allowing organizations to respond rapidly to changing market needs and customer feedback.

Resilience

Cloud-native applications are designed to be fault-tolerant and resilient, with built-in redundancy and failover mechanisms that minimize downtime and data loss.

Flexibility

Cloud-native applications are designed to run on multiple cloud platforms and environments, allowing organizations to choose the best option for their needs and avoid vendor lock-in.

Cost-Efficiency

Cloud-native applications can be deployed and scaled automatically, reducing the need for manual intervention and minimizing operational costs.

Cloud-native is essential because it enables organizations to deliver software faster, with higher quality and reliability, while reducing costs and increasing agility.

DevOps

Explained

DevOps is a software development methodology emphasizing collaboration and communication between development and operations teams to streamline the software development lifecycle. It involves automating and integrating processes across the entire software delivery pipeline, from development and testing to deployment and monitoring. DevOps aims to deliver software faster, with higher quality and reliability, by breaking down silos between teams and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and feedback.

DevOps is a powerful approach to software development that can help businesses achieve greater agility, efficiency, and quality in their software delivery process. By breaking down silos between development and operations teams, DevOps can foster greater collaboration and communication, leading to faster and more reliable software delivery. Additionally, DevOps emphasizes automation and integration across the entire software delivery pipeline, allowing businesses to streamline their development processes and reduce the risk of errors and delays.

However, some potential challenges to implementing DevOps exist, mainly when working with microservices or distributed systems. For example, managing many microservices can require additional tools and expertise. Additionally, DevOps can introduce other security risks if not properly configured and managed. Despite these challenges, DevOps is becoming increasingly popular in modern software development. It allows businesses to deliver software faster, with higher quality and reliability, while improving team collaboration and communication.

Continuous Delivery

Explained

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and deployed to production safely and reliably, with minimal human intervention.

It aims to deliver software updates frequently and consistently, allowing organizations to respond quickly to changing market needs and customer feedback.

Continuous Delivery is a powerful approach to software development that can help businesses achieve greater agility, efficiency, and quality in their software delivery process. By automating the build, test, and deployment process, developers can focus on writing code and delivering new features rather than spending time on manual processes. Additionally, Continuous Delivery can help improve software quality by catching errors and bugs early in the development process before they cause problems in production. However, there are also some potential challenges to implementing Continuous Delivery.

For example, it can require significant investment in tools, infrastructure, and training to implement effectively. Additionally, Continuous Delivery can introduce additional complexity and risk, mainly when working with microservices or distributed systems. Despite these challenges, Continuous Delivery is becoming increasingly popular in modern software development, allowing businesses to deliver software faster and more reliably while improving quality and reducing costs.

Container

Explained

Containers are lightweight, portable, and self-contained software packages that include all the necessary components to run an application, such as code, libraries, and dependencies.

Containers are isolated from the host operating system and other containers, allowing applications to run consistently across different environments and platforms. They are often used in cloud computing and DevOps environments to simplify application deployment, scaling, and management.

Containers are a popular technology for deploying microservices. They provide a lightweight and efficient way to package and deploy individual services. By encapsulating each microservice in its container, businesses can achieve greater modularity and flexibility in their application architecture. Additionally, containers can be easily scaled up or down to match changing demand, making it easier to manage resources and optimize performance.

However, there are also some potential drawbacks to using containers. For example, many containers can be complex and require additional tools and expertise. Additionally, containers can introduce security risks if not properly configured and managed. Despite these challenges, containers are becoming increasingly popular in modern software development. They provide a powerful and flexible way to deploy and manage microservices in cloud-native and DevOps environments.

Microservices

Explained

Microservice architecture is a software development approach that structures an application as a collection of small, independent, and loosely coupled services.

Each service is designed to perform a specific business function and communicates with other services through well-defined APIs. Microservices are typically deployed independently and can be scaled individually, allowing for greater flexibility and agility in software development. The microservice architecture emphasizes modularity, resilience, and fault tolerance and is often used in cloud-native and DevOps environments.

One of the main advantages of microservice architecture is that it allows for greater agility and flexibility in software development. Since each service is independent, changes can be made to one service without affecting the others, making testing and deploying new features more accessible. Additionally, microservices can be scaled independently, allowing businesses to allocate resources where they are needed most. This can result in cost savings and improved performance. However, there are also some potential drawbacks to microservice architecture. For example, managing multiple services can be complex and require high team coordination and communication. Additionally, microservices can introduce additional points of failure, making it more difficult to troubleshoot and diagnose issues. Despite these challenges, microservice architecture is becoming increasingly popular in modern software development, allowing businesses to build more flexible, scalable, and resilient applications.

Typical Web Application

Description

Our example architecture consists of the following explained components. It demonstrates the practical usage of several products together and the associated costs.

Application Servers

run the web application. The application reads from the DB servers via the Elastic IP v2, and users access this web service via another Elastic IP v2 that distributes traffic evenly among them. Upload user files to the Public File Bucket. Installed in an Anti-Affinity group.

Database Server

operate a shared database (MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) capable of replicating data. Installed in an anti-affinity group to ensure the individual components are never on the same physical host.

Backup Server

responsible for reading and uploading the data to the Backup Bucket object storage.

Public File Bucket

stores and publishes user files, such as profile pictures, and makes them publicly available.

Backup Bucket

holds the backups of the DB servers and the Public File Bucket.

Elastic IP

In this scenario, v2 is used as a simple load balancer that distributes traffic evenly.

Exoscale DNS

responsible for resolving the service domain name (example.com).

VIDEO

A Typical Web Application

Calculate Product Pricing

Details

Usually, you want to know the monthly cost of a resource, like you see the price of other subscriptions, such as your mobile data plan, Spotify, Netflix, and so forth.

The official pricing can be found on the web __exoscle.com/pricing __ and in the official price list. There, you can find hourly pricing for the different products. In the Exoscale realm, we calculate 720 hours per month, and other cloud providers use, e.g., 730 hours per month; this information is relevant if you want to compare monthly pricing.

Application Server Instances Calculation

2 x 720 x (100 x 0.00014 + 0.04666) = €87.35/month

• 2x Medium (€0.04666/h)
• 100 GB disk (€0.00014/h/GB)
• 720 hours per month

Database Server Instances Calculation

3 x 720 x (400 x 0.00014 + 0.04666) = €221.75/month

• 3x Medium (€0.04666/h)
• 400 GB disk (€0.00014/h/GB)
• 720 hours per month

Backup Server Instance Calculation

1 x 720 x (50 x 0.00014 + 0.01458) = €15.54/month

• 1x Tiny (€0.01458/h)
• 50 GB disk (€0.00014/h/GB)
• 720 hours per month

Elastic IP Calculation

2 x 720 x 0.01389 = €20.00/month

• 2x Elastic IP v2 (€0.01389/h)
• 720 hours per month

Exoscale DNS Calculation

1x SMALL = €1/month

• 1x SMALL
• monthly subscription

With DNS, you enroll in a monthly recurring subscription that is automatically renewed. Every package entitles you to register up to the indicated number of zones.

SMALL     ( 1 Zone  =   €1/month)
MEDIUM    (10 Zones =   €5/month)
LARGE     (50 Zones =  €25/month)

Calculate Scenario Pricing

Details

For overall scenario pricing, we have to add up all component prices—like the ones we calculated before—in our scenario, add data transfers to the Internet, and add the amount of storage in the rest to the equation.

Additional storage costs are associated with Simple Object Storage (SOS), a scalable, reliable, cost-effective solution to support your application. Backup or serve your data from any Exoscale zone with no hidden fees using your existing S3-compatible tooling and a familiar API.

Application Server Data Transfer Calculation

6 x 720 x 1.42 GB = 6134.40 GB/month

• data transfer to the Internet: 1000 GB/month
• free tier definition = 1.42 GB/h/instance

The free tier for our web application, which consists of 6 instances, is 6134 GB; the monthly data transfer to the Internet is 1000 GB; hence, it is below the free tier for our scenario.

Public File Bucket Calculation

200 x 0.020 + 10000 x 0.020 = €204.00/month

• 200 GB data stored
• 10 TB data transferred (10000 GB)

Backup Bucket Calculation

1000 x 0.020 = €20.00/month

• 1 TB data stored (1000 GB)

Calculation of Complete Scenario

Application Server Instances            €  87.35/month
Database Server Instances               € 221.75/month
Backup Server Instance	                €  15.54/month
Elastic IP	                            €  20.00/month
DNS	                                    €  1.00/month
Application Server Data Transfer        €  0.00/month
Public File Bucket	                    € 204.00/month
Backup Bucket                           €  20.00/month
------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL                                   € 569.64/month

Pricing Calculator

Pricing Calculator

A simple and convenient tool to get product pricing for various configurations always available here:

www.exoscale.com/calculator