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Characteristics of our new "Plus" flavors

So far, the most common use case for cloud servers has probably been small VMs with at most short load peaks. By sharing physical resources, cloud offerings help avoid high hardware investments and infrastructure overheads. However, the advantages of the cloud over your own hardware also include the fact that you can remain flexible at all times and that ongoing hardware maintenance is taken care of – even in cases where sharing available computing power is not the main focus.

Our new "Plus" flavors are perfect for servers with high performance requirements. Unlike with the existing "Flex" flavors, the physically available computing power is not overcommitted; the allocated number of CPU cores is dedicated to each virtual server. You can and may make full use of this performance at any time, since the computing power of our "Plus" offers is not subject to so-called fair-use regulations. At the same time you are protected given that "neighbors" with compute-intensive workloads on the same hardware have no impact on the number of cores available to your server.

Based on the latest hardware generation

This offer is made possible by the use of leading-edge hardware. cloudscale.ch is one of the very first IaaS providers to employ compute nodes with the recently launched AMD EPYC "Rome" processors, which feature up to 64 physical cores per socket. This provides capacity to combine all the advantages of a cloud server with the computing power of a dedicated server, which results in the best of both worlds, so to speak.

At cloudscale.ch, we have, incidentally, already successfully relied on AMD systems in the past, namely for our Ceph-based storage cluster. The high number of PCIe lanes, in particular, was key and enabled us to migrate completely from conventional SSDs to even more powerful NVMe SSDs.

In addition, it is good to know that after repeated descriptions of side-channel attacks targeting vulnerabilities in processor designs over the past two years, we have also deactivated simultaneous multithreading (SMT) for our latest generation of compute nodes. This ensures that SMT-based attacks are not possible from the outset.

Take advantage of more power right away

We particularly recommend our new "Plus" flavors for virtual servers that constantly require medium to high computing power. With 2 to 112 dedicated CPU cores, you have packed power at your exclusive service 24/7. This allows you, for example, to further increase the efficiency of Kubernetes clusters or other container setups. Workloads that depend on predictable performance can benefit as well given that, without competition from neighboring servers, the CPU cycles are reliably available to your real-time applications exactly when they are needed.

When creating a new server, simply select the desired "Plus" flavor, or scale existing servers as usual. It goes without saying that you can reconsider and switch to any of our other "Flex" and "Plus" flavors whenever you like. This will allow you to play it safe and, thanks to this flexibility, elegantly handle even short-term load peaks, e.g. during your Black Friday promotion.

Try it out for yourself: cloudscale.ch is offering you all the "Plus" flavors with a 25% discount until the end of 2019, i.e. at the price of the corresponding "Flex" offer with the same amount of RAM. If we are able to convince you of "Plus", you will be charged the regular price from January 2020; if not, you can simply scale to any other flavor.

With dedicated CPU power, cloudscale.ch now also meets the needs of your most demanding workloads. It goes without saying that our new "Plus" flavors are available at both cloud locations and are therefore also suitable for geo-redundant setups. This means that you will be prepared for any run.

Got power,
Your cloudscale.ch team