Price reduction opportunities: The new x flavors have arrived

In this article, you will learn

• how to save 30 to 40 percent on compute costs,
• which characteristics the new x flavors have and
• for which use cases they are optimal.

Attention, bargain hunters: Since June 2025, the Open Telekom Cloud has offered flexible instances at reduced prices. If you require large-scale computing resources on demand, the new x flavors can help you save up to 30 or 40 percent. The flexible flavors are billed exclusively in elastic, pay-as-you-use mode – without any usage time limits. Once purchased, they remain available to the user until they are manually shut down.

The Open Telekom Cloud continues to evolve its services to help organizations reduce costs, scale flexibly, and maximize the value of their IT investments. The launch of flexible purpose instances (x flavors) marks a significant milestone in this journey, providing the access to discounted compute resources and an improved price/performance ratio. 

This article explores the concept of flexible instances. We show how they work, explain the benefits they offer, and provide ideal use cases. We talk about the latest innovations, including their integration with standby pools in Virtual Machine scale sets.

Flexible flavors offer the same performance, security, and scalability as regular ECS instances; the key differences lie in pricing and capacity commitments. Additionally, these flavors feature optimized configurations that enable the creation of instances tailored to specific needs, such as 3- and 6-vCPU variants, not available within the standard compute families in the ECS service.

Mostly, the new x1 and x1e flavors offer the same characteristics as the existing standard (general purpose and compute-optimized) VMs. They provide the same SLA, can be included in Enterprise Agreements, allow the use of auto scaling policies, Cloud Container Engine (CCE) node pools, and backups through Cloud Backup & Recovery (CBR). They also support instance upgrades and resizing, including exchanges with standard flavors. Network parameters such as NICs (network interface cards), packets per second (PPS) and bandwidth are similar.

Let’s have a look at the differences. Flexible x flavors are currently available in configurations ranging from 2 to 12 vCPUs and are supported only on Open Linux and Windows. The main difference, however, is the price. An example: Using a c3 or c4 flavor with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM (c3.large.2 or c4.large.2) costs 13.22 and 13.84 cents per hour, respectively. Switching to the matching x1e.large.2 flavor, with the same specs, will result in a cost decrease of around 40 percent (8.21 cent per hour). In this case the x1e flavor provides the same performance as the c3 flavor and only a decrease of 1.4 percent in performance compared to the c4 flavor. Upgrading from a 2-vCPU x1e to a 3-vCPU x1e results in a 50 percent performance boost while still maintaining a 7 percent cost savings in comparison to the cheaper c3 standard flavor.

Flexible purpose instances are best suited for workloads covering scenarios such as:

Large-scale data processing, report generation, log processing, ETL (extract, transform, load) jobs, and video encoding benefit from both high compute power and substantial cost savings.

Running analytics on platforms like Hadoop or Spark, especially when using Open Telekom Cloud services such as Data Warehouse Service (DWS) and Data Lake Insight (DLI), can be significantly cheaper using flexible purpose instances.

Continuous integration and deployment tasks, which are often short-lived and retryable, are ideal for flexible-purpose instances. These instances are also well suited for non-production environments used for testing new features or running integration tests.

All kind of ETL (extract, transform, load), batch, rendering and processing workload which exceeds default load conditions can benefit from flexible purpose instances. These instances can be added for dynamic and plannable additional workloads.

Flexible-purpose instances are registered in the ECS service just like other ECS instances and are identified by names beginning with x1 or x1e. These instances can be launched via the Console, API, or Terraform – just like other instances. Instance resizing enables seamless migration from other ECS product families, hence moving an instance from general purpose or compute optimized to flexible purpose can be achieved with a couple of clicks. As with all Open Telekom Cloud services, there is no compromise on security or reliability. Flexible-purpose instances are fully covered by the existing SLA and Enterprise Service Agreements.

The only limitations for flexible purpose instances involve monthly consumption caps and the use of operating systems with additional paid subscriptions. Currently, all Open Linux OS distributions and Windows are supported.

Open Telekom Cloud’s flexible purpose instances offer an excellent opportunity for all customers to achieve significant cost savings without retaining access to robust cloud compute resources. Our existing portfolio of general-purpose and compute-optimized instances now welcomes a powerful new team-mate, further expanding the cloud architect’s toolkit and enabling greater value from every Euro spent in the cloud.