Catalyst Cloud is excited to announce the introduction of new c2-burst compute flavours. The new flavours offer a cost effective option for workloads that typically have low CPU demands but may require increased CPU usage for periods of time. Suitable workloads may include:

• micro-services
• web sites
• load balancers
• small databases and
• test environments

But any application that has a low average CPU usage can take advantage of burst compute instances. A good use case for c2-burst compute is a web server that experiences spikes in traffic during the day and little or no traffic at other times.

Services hosted on a c2-burst compute instance will save you money compared to running on a regular compute flavour.
C2-burst virtual servers are powered by Intel Xeon CPUS, from 1 to 8 vCPU and from 0.5GB to 32GB of RAM. C2-burst VMs have access to 10Gbit/s networking and like our other services, are billed by the hour.
C2-burst compute is now available as Beta in our Porirua region and is subject to the conditions of Beta as described in our Service Terms.

When launched as Generally Available (GA), the C2-burst compute flavours offer the same security and resilience as our other compute flavours, making them suitable to hosting business critical applications. Any operating system that can be hosted on our regular compute flavours can be hosted on the c2-burst compute flavour.

Utilising the new flavour is as simple as creating a new instance and selecting the c2-burst flavour with suitable RAM and vCPU, from your Catalyst Cloud dashboard. Existing instances in Porirua can be moved to the new burst compute flavours by resizing the instance and selecting a c2-burst flavour. If a burst flavour is no longer suitable for your application's needs then the instance can be resized to a traditional flavour with more CPU dedicated resources.

Priced from under $8/month, the available flavours range from 1 vcpu with 512MB of RAM to 8 vcpus and 32GB of RAM. Each flavour provides a minimum of CPU resource with the ability to use a higher level of CPU resource on demand.

We welcome you trying this new flavour and feeding back on your experience.