---
title: "Five years and counting"
description: "Exoscale celebrates its 5 year anniversary as European cloud provider"
date: 2018-02-09
author: "Pierre-Yves Ritschard"
tags: ["event"]
url: https://www.exoscale.com/blog/five-years-and-counting/
---
# Five years and counting

![Five Years and Counting](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/five-years-and-counting/exoscale-birthday.jpg)

Just about [five years
ago](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/we-have-lift-off/) we
lifted the covers of the service we had confidentially been preparing
and running for early adopters. While it's a short span in human time,
in the tech business it's already an era; to wit, technology which has
now made its way into the standard toolbox of many companies, such as
[Docker](https://www.docker.com/),
[Ansible](https://www.ansible.com/),
[Terraform](https://www.terraform.io) did not even exist back then.

What was true then and still holds today is the need for an
automation-focused public-cloud offering, providing a sound substrate
to build applications free from potential government overreach.

We made a couple of initial architectural choices which defined the
platforms, such as:

- Local storage for fast I/O
- A security-groups approach to network isolation

This quickly let Exoscale stand-out as a perfect platform for scalable
infrastructrure design to host modern applications, but did require a
substantial pedagogical effort on our part.

We covered a lot of ground since then, from putting user experience at
the heart of our concerns and ensuring dealing with complex
infrastructure concepts stayed a pleasant experience. We also
gradually added features to serve more advanced use-cases:
[Object-Storage](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/introducing-sos/),
[Organizations](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/organizations-on-exoscale/),
[DNS Zone hosting](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/get-in-the-zone/),
[Anti-Affinity](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/anti-affinity/),
[Snapshots](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/feature-announcement-snapshot/),
[Elastic IPs](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/introducing-elastic-ips/),
[Private Networks](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/introducing-private-networks/),
as well as many small improvements and tooling support in the
surrounding automation ecosystem. On the capacity front, we added tons of compute and
storage capacity, as well as three additional zones in addition to our initial
Geneva Datacenter:
[Zurich](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/data-underground/),
[Vienna](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/announcing-vienna-zone/),
and
[Frankfurt](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/announcing-frankfurt-zone/).

![Exoscale timeline](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/five-years-and-counting/exoscale-timeline.jpg)

Doing so allowed us to capture great traction in Switzerland and
beyond, and we're honored to serve computation in the [research
space](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/exoscale-10k-cpus/),
financial industry, health industry, and many more.

In that span of time, the tech world did not keep still and saw the
fast adoption of container technology, as well as container
orchestration platform. Container orchestration superseded more
constrained PaaS offering for many and is making strides in companies
of all sizes.

To better support these workloads, we undertook to write our own
network orchestration controller, the foundation on which our Elastic
IP addresses and Private networks are built. This foundation will be
expanded this year to provide an even better environment for both
enterprise applications and container orchestrators, with the release of:

- **IPv6 support**
- **Managed Private Networks**, to avoid manually configuring private
  network addresses
- **IPsec gateways**, for seamless routing to private networks
- **A programmable load-balancer**, as the secure front door to your
  workloads
- **Identity management**, for fine-grained control of API key access
- **RHEL** and **Atomic OS**, as new operating system options
- **Custom OS images**, to allow quick startup of cooked images

To top it all, we will adapt the price of our recently updated object
store down to **CHF 0.0198**.- or **0.018 €** per gigabyte per month in 
the coming days.

Infrastructure is not all about technology, and we understand how much
our customers value safe and trusted partners. To that end, we are
carrying out two initiatives in the first part of 2018:

- A certification process to ensure Exoscale is fully ISO-27001 compliant
- Self-service data-processing agreements to make GDPR-compliance a breeze for our customers


Through it all, we intend to continue entertaining you with even more
quality content, and we hope the five coming years will be as exciting
as the last 5 ones were!