Today, we are celebrating 10 years of Exoscale! It has been an adventurous climb from the lift-off in 2013 to the 5 years celebrations to today’s 10 years anniversary. From day one we focused on our core values: privacy, open source and simplicity. Being an automation-focused public cloud that focuses on security and privacy has been our aim back in 2013 and remains true today.
We are looking back on a decade of change, developments and challenges that shaped our cloud platform to the trusted European cloud provider that we are today. Take a deep breath and let’s travel back to where it all started.
A look back
10 years ago, the platform started lightly: VMs, backed by persistent storage — that was it.
This light-weight version, though, was only the start to something bigger. Step-by-step we added more and more services and features, starting with Object Storage, DNS, Private Networks, Anti-Affinity Groups and Elastic IPs. Over time Exoscale developed to become a more and more complete cloud, suiting the requirements and needs of our customers.
The Exoscale ecosystem has grown and evolved as well. By providing not only the portal, CLI, and API but also supporting automation tools like Terraform, we are covering the full stack of technical requirements that today’s businesses and developers are looking for.
But not only the ecosystem and platform have grown. Over the years we expanded our data center footprint in Europe. After the first data center in Geneva, we added zones in Zurich, Vienna, Frankfurt, Munich and Sofia. Six zones in total are available for customers to ensure best options.
2017 marks an important year for Exoscale as it joined A1 Digital, a large European group traded on the Vienna Stock Exchange. This gives the company a strong backing, allowing it to continuously and sustainably grow.
Increasing the pace
What started and grew steadily, and now accelerated in the past two years. In addition to the ongoing feature releases and updates, we developed our very own Managed Kubernetes offering, Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS), to allow customers taking advantage of container orchestration directly on the platform.
SKS was closely followed by the release of Managed Databases which further completed our cloud offering. From PostgreSQL to OpenSearch, currently five of the major used open source databases can be started within minutes on our platform. It integrates seamlessly with all our services and tools.
Despite all recent developments, our portal and services are still easy to use. It remains important to us to provide all users a smooth and stable experience, be it via the portal, CLI or API.
Relying on security and privacy
Security and privacy have always been part of our core values. We comply with various global and local security frameworks, to enable a safe adoption of our platform. By being a European cloud provider with data centers located in Europe we are fully GDPR compliant and will stay so in the future as well.
To enable customers to find certifications easily we launched the compliance center within the portal.
What’s coming next
Continuous development and improvement will keep us busy in the next 10 years as well. New database services, new Object Storage features, new data center zones; we are currently working on multiple projects to further improve our platform.
Block Storage, another component to complete our cloud offering, will be a major focus throughout 2023.
The past 10 years have been an exciting time for the whole Exoscale community. With all the new developments upcoming, we are looking forward to taking the next steps, developing our platform to a secure and confidential cloud.
