Overview

Exoscale Compute Instances are high-performance, KVM-based virtual machines designed to support a wide range of workloads—from small-scale applications to complex, distributed systems. They offer rapid provisioning, flexible scaling, and seamless integration with DevOps tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes.

Terminology

Understanding the basic terms used in Exoscale Compute will help you get up and running quickly.

Instance
A Compute Instance is a virtual machine (VM) running in the Exoscale cloud. It behaves like a traditional server but is virtualized and runs on shared physical infrastructure. Instances are fully self-contained environments and can run various operating systems (Linux, Windows, custom ISOs).

Instance Type
The Instance Type defines the resource configuration of your VM — such as number of vCPUs, amount of RAM, and local SSD storage. Exoscale offers different instance families optimized for CPU, memory, storage, or GPU workloads.

Instance Family	Use Case	RAM Range	CPU Cores	Local Storage	Availability
Standard	General-purpose workloads	512MB-225GB	1-24	10GB-1.6TB	All zones
CPU Optimized	Compute-intensive applications	16GB–128GB	8–40	10GB–1.6TB	All zones
Memory Optimized	RAM-intensive applications	16GB–128GB	2–12	10GB-1.6TB	All zones
Storage Optimized	Data-heavy workloads	16GB–128GB	4–16	1TB–10TB	All zones

Template
A Template is a pre-configured disk image used to launch instances. Templates define the base OS and system configuration. You can use public templates provided by Exoscale or upload your own.

Features

Rapid Deployment
Launch virtual machines within seconds through the Exoscale Portal, CLI, or API.
Flexible Instance Types
Choose from various instance families tailored to specific workloads.
Local SSD Storage
All instances come with enterprise-grade local SSD RAID10 storage, ensuring high I/O performance and low latency.
Custom Templates & Snapshots
Create and deploy instances using custom templates and take snapshots for backups or cloning purposes.
Anti-Affinity Groups
Distribute instances across different physical hypervisors to enhance availability.
vTPM and Secureboot
Enhance instance security with vTPM for TPM 2.0 support, enabling Windows Bitlocker encryption, and Secure Boot to ensure only signed OS images are loaded.
Built-In IAM
Granular Identity and Access Management allows precise control over API key permissions.
Instance Pools
Automatically manage groups of identical instances for high availability and scalability.

Availability

Zone	Country	City
`at-vie-1`	Austria	Vienna
`at-vie-2`	Austria	Vienna
`ch-gva-2`	Switzerland	Geneva
`ch-dk-2`	Switzerland	Zurich
`de-fra-1`	Germany	Frankfurt
`de-muc-1`	Germany	Munich
`bg-sof-1`	Bulgaria	Sofia

Limitations

The following table shows which limits are enforced on Compute usage. It also highlights some of the characteristics of the product:

Feature	Limit
Instance Quotas	Organizations can create up to 20 instances. Quota increases can be requested via the Exoscale Portal.
Special Instance Types	Access to certain instance types (e.g., GPU, Mega, Titan, Jumbo) requires activation by the support team. Requests can be made during instance creation.
vTPM and Secureboot	This setting conflicts with netboot profiles as those are not signed and will not boot on an instance with Secureboot enabled.
Zone Constraints	Instances and Instance Pools are confined to a single zone and cannot be migrated across zones post-creation.
Elastic IPs	Organizations are initially limited to 5 Elastic IPs. Instances sharing an Elastic IP cannot communicate with each other using that IP.
Block Storage Attachments	A maximum of 5 block storage volumes can be attached to a single instance by default. Up to 15 volumes can be attached upon demand.