General questions about Compute Cloud
Why use cloud computing?
Yandex Cloud offers scalable computing capacity: you can quickly create and start VMs on demand and stop them when the load decreases. By leveraging cloud resources, you reduce your IT infrastructure costs as you pay only for the resources you actually consume.
Cloud infrastructure is easier to manage, so you can focus on your business tasks rather than maintaining servers.
What can I do with a Yandex Cloud VM?
- Use only the computing capacity you really need. You do not have to buy expensive, powerful equipment for every business task that requires it. Instead, you can create a Yandex Cloud VM and use it if and when required.
- Quickly scale computing power up or down as needed. You can start additional VMs during peak periods and stop them when the load drops.
- Use VMs to deploy applications that must always be available. You do not need to worry about guaranteeing server uptime: Yandex Cloud will keep it running smoothly. Focus on building your software.
- Configure backups to easily recover your data in the event of data loss.
- Create and distribute VM disk images. You can use images to quickly deploy your software on other VMs.
- Automate VM management using the API and scripts in the CLI.
For more information about Yandex Cloud VMs, see VMs in Compute Cloud.
How do Yandex Cloud VMs differ from regular hosting?
Traditional hosting offers resources on lease with pre-agreed performance for a fixed term. Yandex Cloud VMs enable you to use cloud resources as your personal data center. At the same time, you get all the advantages of the fault tolerant infrastructure Yandex Cloud data centers provide.
You can scale your cloud infrastructure as your performance requirements change. This way you can manage how many resources you are using at any given time and how much you pay for them.
You will also be able to monitor and manage the status of your VMs. You can start and stop VMs as needed. You can set up your VM software configuration and change it as required. Disk images and snapshots enable you to easily transfer data between your VMs.
How do I get started with a Yandex Cloud VM?
You can create your first VM by following one of the scenarios described in Getting started with Compute Cloud.
How do I access my VM?
You can connect to your VM from another VM within the same cloud network. To connect, use the VM internal IP address or FQDN.
If you assigned a public IP address to your VM when creating it, you can use that IP address to connect to the VM from the internet.
You can get IP addresses, FQDNs, and other information in the management console, under Network on the VM page.
For more information, see VM network interfaces.
Use SSH to connect to your Linux VMs. Use RDP to connect to your Windows VMs.
How quickly can I adjust the capacity of my IT systems?
You can adjust your IT system capacity in one of the following ways:
- Create VMs with the appropriate configuration and pre-installed software in advance. During peak loads, simply start these VMs to scale up your IT system capacity. When the load decreases, you can stop some of the VMs to avoid paying for extra resources.
- If you frequently need new VMs with the same configuration, you can create a boot disk image and use it when creating VMs.
Why is my VM running slowly?
As with any servers, including physical ones, VM performance depends on the performance of the following:
- CPU
- RAM
- Disks
- Network
Note that the physical core thread allocated to your VM handles not only the vCPU, but also QEMU virtualization and I/O operations (both network and disk ones).
General best practices for improving VM performance:
-
For product solutions, use a vCPU with a guaranteed performance of at least 100%. If you are using a vCPU with performance below 100%, the vCPU performance may decrease to the guaranteed minimum due to other active processes on the same physical core. For example, for 5% performance, this is only about 100 MHz of clock frequency, which is most likely insufficient for a production server.
If the graphs show that the vCPU load is close to 100% for a long time or at the time the issue occurs, we recommend increasing the number of cores.
-
Never use the swap file. It causes a significant drop in performance. The best solution is to expand vRAM if your system is running low on memory. With Linux, you can also use
zram-config. -
Use large network SSDs. Network disks can become a bottleneck in the system. They have limits on IOPS and bandwidth, which vary depending on the disk type and size. For more information, see Disk and file storage limits.
Keep in mind that disk performance also depends on the read and write request size. For details, see Read and write operations.
You should read and write data in several threads.
-
Note that network computing depends on the vCPU performance. To diagnose network problems, run synthetic tests that do not involve disk usage. If the issue is indeed related to a slow network, we recommend adding vCPUs and retesting.
Which operating systems do Yandex Cloud VMs support?
Yandex Cloud VMs support Linux and Windows operating systems.
Public boot disk images for popular distributions of these systems are available and tested in Yandex Cloud.
Why can't I see my previous operations in the management console?
The management console stores information about events for 14 days.
Does the service meet the requirements of the Russian Federation Federal Law 152-FZ on personal data?
Yes, it does. You can read the full security audit conclusion here.
How do I contact support?
You can contact support in the Support section of the management console.
Can I get the logs of what I do when I work with Yandex Cloud?
Yes, you can request information about operations with your resources from Yandex Cloud. For more information, see Data requests.
How do I learn about the cost?
See the pricing for this service in Compute Cloud pricing policy. You can also use our calculator.