Instances with stable performance at an affordable price
Discovery instances are based on shared resources, and offer the full experience and features of the Public Cloud at a lower cost. You can manage your instances with the same tools for your tests, development phases and sandbox environments. You also get great value for money in terms of features, and the ability to upgrade your solution at any time in just a few clicks.
Manageable via OpenStack APIs
Discovery instances benefit from the Public Cloud ecosystem, OpenStack APIs, and the entire orchestration system associated with it. This is why they are suitable for deployment or configuration tests, sandbox environments, and many other use cases involving automation.
Robust and economical
These instances offer a wide range of CPU, RAM, storage and network capacity options. They are designed for development environments, sandboxes and integration tests. You can easily add storage volumes to them, depending on your needs.
Designed for scaling
You can use our instances to create test environments, then go even further in your project with our Compute catalogue. They can be deployed automatically on a very large scale, and migrated to instances with guaranteed resources in just a few clicks via the OVHcloud Control Panel or the API.
ISO/IEC 27001, 27701 and health data hosting compliance
Our cloud infrastructures and services are ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 certified. These certifications ensure the presence of an information security management system (ISMS) for managing risks, vulnerabilities and implementing business continuity, as well as a privacy information management system (PIMS). Thanks to our health data hosting compliance, you can also host healthcare data securely.
Use cases
Web apps, development and testing
Get stable performance and reliable features that are suitable for all development needs, sandboxes, functional testing, and much more. They are also great to use as production environments for web applications with workloads that are not resource-intensive.
Perfect for building a cloud-native software factory
Discovery instances are adapted to suit the needs of continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) systems, complementing our Managed Kubernetes Service solution, for example. Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI and others connect directly to the OpenStack and Kubernetes APIs to orchestrate your integration tests.
Horizontal scalability
Need to boot hundreds of instances to check your application’s horizontal scalability behaviours, or simply simulate a large number of workers? Discovery instances are deployed in a matter of seconds, and you can test these scenarios in a full-scale version.
Use case
Boot an instanceopenstack server create --flavor d2-4 --image debian server01
Boot 100 instances of the same typeopenstack server create --flavor d2-4 --image debian --max 100 servers
Features
Resize your instance
Boot your instance with the essential services, then resize it to suit your changing needs using our comprehensive catalogue.
Network capacity
Like the models in the dedicated resource ranges, these instances offer different levels of bandwidth, so you can hot-build flexible, scalable architectures.
Add volumes
Depending on your needs, you can add storage volumes to increase the available space of your Discovery instance.
A wide range of operating systems
Choose from a set of Unix distributions. You can also import your own images. Many formats are supported, including those associated with the most popular private and public clouds.
Billing
Discovery instances are the most accessible of the range — they are billed hourly or monthly, like all of our other instances, on a pay-as-you-go basis. The price depends on the size of the instance you have booted, and the duration of its use.
Other products
What is a sandbox environment?
A sandbox environment is an isolated runtime environment. It can be used as an airtight test and/or development environment. Since the different sequences only run within the sandbox environment, a development team can run numerous tests to validate the solidity of an application code, check the compatibility of an application with several operating systems, test and validate compatibility between application versions and different operating system versions, and much more. The sandbox environment is comparable to an actual sandbox, where developers can perform all sorts of tests and try out different ideas with no risk of impacting the production environment.
The Public Cloud universe is based on virtualisation technology, which delivers a fully-isolated environment to the user. With the isolation properties of virtualisation technology, the operating system and application code running inside the virtual machine cannot access, modify or read data from other virtual machines sharing the host machine. They also do not hold privileged mode access for controlling the host machine.
Why use a sandbox?
Sandbox environments can be used at different stages of the development process, up to and including an application’s production stage. It is common to use one dedicated sandbox for development purposes, and another for pre-production validation testing — due to the flexibility, on-demand availability and scalability of Discovery instances, for example. During the software development cycle, it is essential to test and validate that the application code is working properly. With a sandbox environment, you can run these tests in isolation, and deploy them on a large scale. Once these tests have been validated, you can simply delete the sandbox environments, as you no longer need them.
FAQ
What service level agreement (SLA) is guaranteed by OVHcloud on a Discovery instance?
The SLA guarantees 99.95% monthly availability on Discovery instances. For further information, please refer to the Terms & conditions.
Can I resize a Discovery instance?
Yes, you can increase the size of Discovery instances. However, the size cannot be reduced.
Can I upgrade a Discovery instance to a Guaranteed Resources instance?
Yes, a Discovery instance can be upgraded to a more high-performance instance, like the models from the Guaranteed Resources range. This would mean they get 100% of the allocated power.
Do Discovery instances have any specific restrictions?
No, Discovery instances are used the same way as other instances, and have the same features. Please note that the Managed Kubernetes service can be used to orchestrate Discovery instances based on the D2-4 model.
What regions are Discovery instances available in?
The Public Cloud solution is available in Europe (Gravelines, Strasbourg, London, Frankfurt, Warsaw), North America (Beauharnois, Vint Hill, Hillsboro) and the Asia-Pacific region (Sydney, Singapore).
Over the course of a month, can I switch to hourly billing from an instance that is currently billed monthly?
If you have monthly billing set up, you cannot switch to hourly billing over the course of the month. Before you launch an instance, please take care to select the billing method that is best suited to your project.
What are the advantages of Discovery instances over the legacy Sandbox instances?
OVHcloud regularly scales its Public Cloud instances to deliver optimal performance for the best price. Our Sandbox range offers instances with shared resources, and is based on a configuration that is already a few years old. We have worked on the Discovery range to provide you with the same type of service with more performance — and we are delivering this through moves such as migration to NVMe drives.In addition to a better hardware configuration, the system will also be scaled up. For example, a D2-4 instance offers 2.5 times more storage, and also increases bandwidth by a factor of 2.5 compared to the S1-4 instance. A D2-8 instance will already be at 500Mbps on private and public networks, whereas an S1-8 instance was at 100Mbps.