Compute concepts

Background and rationale for the Compute service primitives. Read these to understand what each piece is, how the platform composes them into a running instance, and how to think about availability, placement, and specialized workloads. For step-by-step procedures, see the how-to guides.

Concepts

Apps: Apps is a deployment feature in the Compute section of the Console (Compute > Apps). You pick an app from the catalog, and the platform provisions an instance from a pre-built image with the...
Cloud-init and First-boot Configuration: cloud-init is the industry-standard first-boot agent that runs inside Linux and BSD guests. When you launch an instance, Compute (OpenStack Nova) passes user data to the guest. cloud-init reads that...
Flavors: Flavors define the resource shape of an instance: vCPU count, memory, root disk size, and optional ephemeral or swap storage. The Compute service (OpenStack Nova) exposes flavors as named resource...
High Availability on Quake AI: A single instance running your application is a single point of failure. When that instance goes down (planned maintenance, hardware fault, or software crash), your users see an outage. High...
Images: Images give each new instance the same starting point: operating system, tooling, and baseline configuration. The Images service (OpenStack Glance) lets you discover, register, and retrieve virtual...
Instance Snapshots: Instance snapshots capture the full state of a running instance (root disk data, memory, and configuration) as an image you can store, clone from, or restore to. They are part of the Compute service...
Instances: Instances are virtual machines (VMs) that run on Quake AI. They give you isolated compute (CPU, memory, disk, and network), so you deploy applications and services inside projects without sharing an...
Key Pairs: Key pairs are the default way you prove you are allowed to log in to Linux instances without sending a password over the network. Quake AI stores the public half and injects it into the guest; you...
Self-hosted AI on Cloud Infrastructure: Self-hosted AI means running language models on infrastructure you control. Your prompts and completions stay on your network. You pay a fixed compute cost (not per token), and you can run open-weight...
Server Groups: Server groups apply placement policies (affinity or anti-affinity) that control whether your instances land on the same physical host or are spread across different hosts. The Compute service...

Also known as

Amis and Machine Images: An AWS AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is a boot template for EC2. On Quake AI the same role is an image in the Images service (OpenStack Glance): a disk template with metadata (minimum disk, OS family)...
Droplets on Quake AI: A DigitalOcean Droplet is a Linux or Windows VM with a fixed plan size and a proprietary control API. On Quake AI the same role is an instance created through Nova: you pick a flavor, an image...
EC2 on Quake AI: Amazon EC2 is AWS compute. On Quake AI the equivalent workload runs as Nova instances in a project, sized with flavors, booted from images, and reached over networks and security groups.
Servers (Compute Instances): When documentation or the OpenStack CLI says server, it means a compute instance on Quake AI: a running virtual machine backed by Nova, not a physical rack server and not a server group placement...
Snapshots (Instance vs Volume): Snapshot means different things depending on which service creates it. On Quake AI, separate the two cases before you plan backup or migration.
SSH Keys on Quake AI: SSH keys in migration guides and provider consoles map to key pairs on Quake AI: a stored public key Nova injects at instance boot through cloud-init, paired with the private key you keep on your...
Virtual Machines (VMs): On Quake AI, a virtual machine (VM) is an instance: an isolated guest OS running on the Compute service with its own vCPU, memory, disk, and network attachments. Console copy, billing, and most...

Compute concepts

Compute concepts

Concepts

Also known as

Quick answers

Common Compute tasks

See Also