Reference
Exoscale API

Exoscale API

Infrastructure automation API, allowing programmatic access to all Exoscale products and services.

OpenAPI Specification (YAML) | JSON

Last updated: January 8, 2026

Compute
Host anything from simple applications to complex architectures. Start a compute instance in seconds and scale as your infrastructure grows.
SKS
SKS is Exoscale’s scalable Kubernetes service which provides managed Kubernetes control planes with integrated support for Exoscale instance pools ands network load balancers.
DBaaS
Databases as a Service (DBaaS) provides scalable and fully-managed database solutions with high availability and performance backed by Exoscale’s Compute and Storage services.
Object Storage
Exoscale Simple Object Storage (SOS) is an S3-compatible object storage service.
Block Storage
Exoscale’s Block Storage offers persistent externally attached volumes for your Compute instances.
DNS
DNS zone hosting and records management.
IAM
Identity and Access Management: roles, users, policies and credentials for accessing the Exoscale API.
AI
Dedicated Inference lets you run Large Language Models (LLMs) on Exoscale GPU infrastructure.
Audit Trail
Events form the basis of the Exoscale audit-trail, a mechanism to query past events performing mutations on resources which happened on an organization.
General
8 API operations

API Request Signature

In order to authenticate legitimate users, the Exoscale API requires incoming requests to be signed using valid Exoscale API account credentials with the following mechanism.

Signature Mechanism

The message (i.e. content) to sign contains several segments concatenated using a line return character (\n).

All segments must be included and in the described order. For cases where a segment doesn’t fit the context of the request (e.g. no request body) an empty line must be used instead.

  • Request method and request URL (path only), separated by a space character
  • Request body
  • Request URL parameters (Query String) values, concatenated without separator. The matching parameter names have to be specified in the resulting signature header signed-query-args= pragma, separated by semicolons (e.g. p1;p2;pN).
  • Request header values, concatenated without separator (none at the moment, leave empty)
  • Request expiration date in UNIX timestamp format

Example message to sign for GET /v2/resource/a02baf5a-a3e4-49a0-857b-8a08d276c1c0?p1=v1&p2=v2:

GET /v2/resource/a02baf5a-a3e4-49a0-857b-8a08d276c1c0

v1v2

1599140767

The two blank lines above are due to the absence of a request body and signed headers.

Example message to create a security group

POST /v2/security-group
{"name": "my-security-group"}


1599140767

The two blank lines above are due to the absence of query parameters and signed headers.

The request signature consists of the base64-encoded HMAC hash of the UTF-8 encoded message and the Exoscale API secret using the SHA265 function:

signature = BASE64_ENCODE(HMAC_SHA256(Exoscale API secret, message))

Finally, the computed signature must be added to the API request in a Authorization header such as:

Authorization: EXO2-HMAC-SHA256 credential=<Exoscale API key>,expires=<expiration date UNIX timestamp>,signature=<signature>

Example API query:

GET /v2/resource/a02baf5a-a3e4-49a0-857b-8a08d276c1c0?p1=v1&p2=v2 HTTP/1.1
Host: api-ch-gva-2.exoscale.com
Authorization: EXO2-HMAC-SHA256 credential=EXO29147e9f89102b7ac1e88514,signed-query-args=p1;p2,expires=1599140767,signature=2AOBQsbElQb4FpKT/FM/9T4NobjlmZkSGvvdUth/xlY=

Reference Implementations

You can look up the following existing reference implementations:

Zone local resources

The API is deployed across all Exoscale zones. When performing a compute call, you should use the relevant zone for your resource. For example: https://api-de-fra-1.exoscale.com/v2/instance would return only the instances from de-fra-1, https://api-ch-gva-2.exoscale.com/v2/instance from ch-gva-2. To obtain a list of all instances across all zones, you would need to do the corresponding request for each zone.

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