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Included transfer

Each running instance contributes its flavor’s monthly transfer allowance to the shared billing pool, prorated by billed hours. The organization also receives 1 TB per month. Only metered internet egress beyond the shared allowance is charged. See Resource references for accepted reference kinds, lookup scopes, canonical identities and exact list filters. See Resource faults for the active faults array. Compute runs virtual machines. You pick a size, an image and a subnet, and the service builds the boot disk, the network interfaces and the cloud-init seed, then boots the guest. The service is regional — compute.sa-saopaulo-1.basaltic.sh. An instance, its image and its pools all live in one region and never cross into another.

Launching an instance

Flavors, images, disks, keys and cloud-init — and the two fields whose absence quietly costs you a network.

Lifecycle

What start, stop, reboot, resize and reinstall each preserve, and what they destroy.

Volumes and interfaces

Hot-plugging disks and NICs, and which of them survive the instance.

Console access

The boot transcript, a screenshot, and an interactive serial session.

Images

The catalogue, building your own, and what a version actually is.

Instance pools

Several instances from one template, kept in step.

Permissions

Every IAM action, and the one shape that can only be granted on *.

Quotas and troubleshooting

Why a launch failed, what a status is telling you, and the three counters an instance holds at once.

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What an instance is made of

An instance is assembled from resources that mostly exist on their own, and knowing which is which explains most of the lifecycle’s behaviour.
The pattern: anything compute provisioned for you as part of the launch is torn down with the instance, and anything you brought is handed back. What survives a delete is the exact list.

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Instances you did not create

Managed products run on instances too. A load balancer’s replicas and a database cluster’s nodes appear in GET /v1/instances with managed_by set. They are read-only here: reads and console access work, and every lifecycle and mutation call answers 404 — stop, resize, delete, NIC and volume changes alike. Act on them through the resource that owns them.
Reads and the serial console are the exception — they go through a path that does not reject managed instances, which is why a pool replica renders in the console and why you can open a serial session on a database node to see why it will not start.