You provision instances from the Joyent portal. You are charged by the hour for any instances you have provisioned in the Joyent Public Cloud.

You are charged for your instance whether it is running or not.

In this topic:

In this section:

• Advantages of SmartOS and KVM in JPC
• Linux Machine Images
• SmartMachine Images
• Windows Machine Images

Provisioning an Instance

To provision a instance:

1. Click Create Instance in your Joyent portal dashboard. The Create Instance page appears
2. From the first drop-down menu, choose the datacenter where your instance will be provisioned. Currently, Joyent provides the following datacenters:
   • us-west-1: Datacenter located in San Francisco, California.
   • us-sw-1: Datacenter located in Las Vegas, Nevada.
   • us-east-1: Datacenter located in Ashburn, Virginia.
   • eu-ams-1: Datacenter located in Amsterdam, Holland.
3. From the second drop-down menu, select the operating system
4. Choose an image from the list. You can use the second drop-down menu to limit the items on the list to images of a particular operating system. The default is to display all images available in the datacenter you selected.
5. The view changes to allow you to select an instance type which specifies the amount of RAM, disk, and CPUs your instance can use.
6. After you select your instance type, click Create Instance to provision your instance. You can give the instance a name.

   The name field is optional. This name is used in displaying the list of instances. It is not the host name. If you do not provide a name, the image name defaults to the machine UUID, which is unwieldy.

If successful, the portal will refresh and display a page with a confirmation message. You can then access your newly provisioned instance by clicking its name.

What is my next step?

You should take a minute to understand how to login to machines you provision in the Joyent Cloud.