Vultr aims at the big clouds with new virtual machines

Rolls out first Epyc products the same week Google announces cloud infra price rise

Cloud hosting provider Vultr has expanded its portfolio of cloud infrastructure with an new range of high-performance virtual machine instances, including its first products based on AMD Epyc processors, all with NVMe SSD storage.

Vultr, which has data centers across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, said it was aiming to appeal to cloud customers looking for an alternative to the big platforms. This may be particularly relevant given Google’s recent price changes that may see customers paying more for the same services.

The firm's compute platform now features three discrete product lines: Optimized Cloud Compute, Cloud Compute, and Bare Metal. Optimized Cloud Compute is entirely new, while the Cloud Compute lineup is refreshed with this launch.

Vultr said that the Optimized Cloud Compute instances offer dedicated vCPUs, which means that user application performance is not affected by the "noisy neighbour" problem of another user consuming all the resources.

Optimized Cloud Compute VMs start at $28 per month, and are described as elastically scalable. Cloud Compute VMs start at $5 per month, because they run on shared vCPUs. Bare Metal instances start at $120 per month, and provide dedicated physical CPUs.

According to Vultr, the addition of instances powered by 3rd Generation AMD Epyc processors marks the first time it has offered AMD-powered virtual machines. Because of their high per-core performance and maximum frequency of 3.675GHz, the new Epyc-based VMs have now become Vultr's recommended option for most users.

JJ Kardwell, CEO of Vultr's parent company Constant, said in a statement that AMD's efforts with the design, architecture, and performance of its CPUs had helped Vultr to implement an alternative to solutions like AWS EC2.

"This launch represents a big step in helping businesses and developers transition from the Big Tech clouds to our easy-to-use, affordable platform," he claimed.

Optimized Cloud Compute instances are offered in a number of tailored options; General Purpose, CPU Optimized, Memory Optimized and Storage Optimized.

According to Vultr, the General Purpose VMs provide typical balance of CPU, RAM, and NVMe SSD storage, while the CPU Optimized VMs provide proportionally more CPU, as their name suggests, for workloads like video encoding, high performance computing (HPC), and analytics processing.

In the same vein, the Memory Optimized instances are for memory bound applications, providing more RAM for applications such as databases, in-memory databases and caching. The Storage Optimized VMs provide generous proportions of NVMe SSD storage and target use cases such as large non-relational databases like MongoDB, and high frequency online transaction processing (OLTP).

Vultr said that it aims to provide users with a simple interface, plus predictable and transparent pricing, with the performance and enterprise features of bigger players. In the last year, Vultr added VPC Peering and Direct Connect features to make it a more attractive option for enterprise customers. ®