By IBM Cloud Team 2 min read
November 16, 2018

New features are currently available for the IBM Cloud Virtual Servers offering.

The following features are currently available for the IBM® Cloud Virtual Servers offering.

Suspend billing when you’re not using instances

Want to pay only for what you use? You can now suspend billing on virtual server instances. The suspend billing feature is available on virtual server instances that have hourly public flavor sizes with SAN-backed storage. When you power off a virtual server that supports the suspend billing feature, you don’t accrue costs for certain compute resources. Billing stops automatically when the server is powered off. The suspend billing feature helps you reduce cost and prevents you from having to reprovision a virtual server when you need its resources again. For more information, see About suspend billing or the IBM Cloud blog post.

Reserve resources for future virtual server instances

IBM® Cloud Virtual Servers reserved instances offering is now available. This is a great option if you want guaranteed resources for future deployments and cost savings. You choose between either a one or three year contract term for your reserved capacity. Within that reserved capacity, you can reserve a set of up to 20 virtual server instances of a specific size and provision those instances when you need them. You are guaranteed this capacity within the POD and data center of your choice for the life of the contract term. For more information, see Reserved virtual servers.

Import images from IBM Cloud Object Storage service instance to IBM Cloud infrastructure

IBM Cloud infrastructure now interacts with the IBM Cloud Object Storage service that’s provisioned on the IBM Cloud console. IBM Cloud Object Storage offers the Aspera high-speed transfer plug-in that massively decreases the amount of time that is needed to upload a large image. After images are uploaded to IBM Cloud Object Storage, you can import images to IBM Cloud infrastructure from IBM Cloud Object Storage. You can also export images from IBM Cloud infrastructure to IBM Cloud Object Storage.

Placement groups for virtual server instances

Placement groups are now available for IBM® Cloud Virtual Servers. With placement groups, you can use public instances to build for high availability within a data center, or provide an additional level of fault tolerance within a larger deployment. For more information, see Placement groups.

Latest updates for buildpacks

Visit the following pages for a cumulative list of the latest updates:

Latest updates for IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service launched its Kubernetes architecture in May 2017. The previous architecture for single and scalable container groups is now fully deprecated as of December 5, 2017.

See the documentation for information about getting started with the native Kubernetes environment on IBM Cloud. If you have questions, you can post them in the Slack at https://ibm-container-service.slack.com/.

Categories

Announcements  |  Cloud
IBM Cloud Team
IBM Cloud

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