This article serves as an overview highlighting the various features available through Genesis Cloud Compute Service.

Instances

• Genesis Cloud offers accelerator hardware organized into what is termed an instance. Think of it as the remote machine that serves at your command. You can set the specification of this machine when you create an instance. You can access an instance once its state has turned to Active. 

• You can find a guide to how to start an instance here. 

Connecting to your instance

• To take control of the instance you need to establish an SSH connection. To authenticate yourself when establishing the connection you need to either have a SSH Key pair uploaded or set a password. Here is a guide for Linux/macOS and Windows on how to do that.

• To access the instance from Windows OS, please click here for the guide.

• To access the instance from Linux / macOS, please click here for the guide.

Volumes

• You may have large datasets that multiple instances need to access or that should still be available when you stop the associated instances. 

• To simplify managing these large datasets, we offer Volumes that you can attach to any instance you choose. They also stay intact even when you stop the instance. To help you begin, here is a guide on getting started.

Images and Snapshots

• While creating the instance, you always have the option to select any image you want from the 'Select Image' section. We offer Ubuntu, Debain, Ubuntu ML images. We also offer Jupyterlab with Ubuntu ML image. 

• Imagine you have just installed software, and you want to keep this setup for future use. That is where snapshots come in handy. They allow you to capture everything on your instance's system disk. 

• Later on, you can recreate the same instance whenever you need, as many times as you like. Here is a guide on how to take snapshot of the instance.

Networking

• Think of security groups as the rules that determine what kind of traffic is allowed in and out of your instance. They control what ports are allowing incoming or outgoing traffic to go through. 

• The standard security group allows every outgoing traffic on every port, incoming traffic via TCP on Ports 443 and 80 as well as SSH connections on Port 22. 

• You can easily create new security groups that can then be applied to as many instances as you want.
  

• For connecting your local machine with a remote instance you use the Public IP. Additionally, there is a private network between all your instances that allows them to communicate. 

• The connection then never leaves our data center, so it is really quick and also never exposed to outsiders that might want to listen in.

Developer API

• The developer API allows you to do most of the things you would normally do by using our Console Dashboard or GUI by sending requests from your internal scripts. 

• This can for example be helpful when you want to automate instance creation. Get started with the API here.