Glossary

Terms used across the Exoscale documentation, with links to the pages that define and use them.

Anti-Affinity Group

A placement rule that distributes member instances across different physical hypervisors, reducing the impact of a host failure. See the Compute instances overview.

API key

A credential attached to an IAM role, responsible for authentication when accessing Exoscale programmatically. See the IAM quick start.

DBaaS

Exoscale’s Database as a Service deploys fully managed data stores on demand, with enterprise-grade automation, European data residency and clusters with up to 99.99% uptime SLAs. See the DBaaS overview.

Dedicated Inference

A managed AI service within the Concrete AI product suite that deploys and runs AI models as production-ready inference endpoints on Exoscale’s dedicated, sovereign GPU infrastructure, exposed through an OpenAI-compatible API. See the Dedicated Inference overview.

Deploy Target

Also called a Deployment Target; a virtual abstraction layer that lets you provision Compute instances onto dedicated (single-tenant) infrastructure using a specific Deployment Target ID, typically a pool of dedicated hypervisors managed by Exoscale. See the Dedicated Hypervisors overview.

Elastic IP (EIP)

A static IP address that can be persistently attached to multiple Compute instances within the same zone, allowing seamless transition and consistent IP configuration across instances. See the Elastic IP overview.

IAM policy

A set of permissions attached to an identity that defines what actions it can perform on which resources. See the IAM overview.

IAM role

A collection of policies that can be assigned to an identity to streamline permission assignments for specific needs or job functions. See the IAM overview.

Instance Pool

A managed group of Compute instances used to maintain capacity and support automated scaling and replacement. See the Compute instances overview.

Instance Type

The resource configuration of a Compute instance — number of vCPUs, amount of RAM, and local SSD storage. Exoscale offers instance families optimized for CPU, memory, storage, or GPU workloads. See the Compute instances overview.

Key Management Service (KMS)

A centralized, fully managed security service that creates, controls, and manages the lifecycle of cryptographic keys, providing data encryption across Exoscale workloads, custom applications, and external integrations. See the KMS overview.

Network Load Balancer (NLB)

A Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) load balancer that distributes incoming traffic to Compute instances managed by an Instance Pool, with round robin, source-hash, and MagLev strategies plus health checks. See the NLB overview.

Organization

The context in which any action on the Exoscale platform is performed; an organization groups users, resources, and billing. See the Organization documentation.

Private Connect

Connects on-premises or hosted infrastructure with one or more private networks from a single Exoscale organization. See the Private Connect overview.

Private Network

A private network segment shared only with your own instances; each instance may provision one or more additional network interfaces bound to it. See the Private Network overview.

Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS)

A fully managed Kubernetes offering that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, with a production-ready control plane and full Kubernetes ecosystem support. See the SKS overview.

Security Group

A set of stateful ingress and egress firewall rules, managed at the hypervisor level, that control traffic to and from an instance. See the Security Group overview.

Simple Object Storage (SOS)

A highly durable, S3-compatible object storage service that offers data accessibility across multiple locations over HTTP(s) and supports a wide range of tools, libraries, and programming languages. See the SOS overview.

Template

A pre-configured disk image used to launch instances; templates define the base OS and system configuration, and can be public (Exoscale-provided) or custom (uploaded by you). See the Compute instances overview.

Zone

A location in which an instance and its zone-scoped resources are created; an instance cannot be moved to another zone after creation. See the Compute instances overview and Data Center Zones.