Overview
Introduction
Zenlayer Elastic Compute (ZEC) is a computing service that runs and scales compute instances — virtual machines today, with bare-metal instances on the way — on Zenlayer's global network. Deploy compute near your users worldwide, ride a high-performance low-latency backbone, and skip the hardware.
ZEC's Three Pillars
ZEC's product positioning rests on three pillars.
Global coverage
ZEC reaches further than the hyperscalers, but never so far out that we cannot deliver production-grade network and compute. The locations we offer are the locations we can stand behind.
The global footprint is exposed through the Global VPC — a single VPC (VPC-Default) that your account starts with, already present in every region, with an auto-provisioned non-overlapping /20 subnet per region. Launching an instance in a new region is one click; there are no CIDR plans, no peering objects, no cross-region routes to install. Private traffic between regions within the same VPC rides the Zenlayer backbone. For reaching outside the VPC — another ZEC VPC, another cloud, or a partner network — Border Gateway is the edge router that speaks BGP and installs learned prefixes into the VPC route table.
Built for production
Every line of code, every metric, every operational choice exists to give workloads running on ZEC a stable, predictable environment — and to give you the evidence you need to trust it. ZEC is not a VPS; it is infrastructure for production applications.
Concretely:
Hardware you can match to the workload. Instance families span AMD EPYC (2nd / 3rd / 4th gen) and Intel Xeon Scalable (2nd / 4th gen), with 1:2 / 1:4 / 1:8 vCPU-to-RAM ratios and dedicated GPU families (z3a, z4i) for GPU instances. NVMe SSD block storage backs block devices.
Public network billing that matches how mature ops teams plan. Pick Data Transfer, Flat Rate, or Aggregated Burstable 95th per EIP — with an explicit bandwidth cap and a choice of loose or tight shaping — so cost and performance are decisions you make, not surprises you discover.
DDoS mitigation is on by default. Every EIP is covered by Layer 3/4 DDoS protection without configuration. Per-EIP threshold rules provide a second layer at the edge, including in regions where upstream cleaning isn't yet deployed.
Metrics that are honest about what's happening. Overprovisioning indicators, CPU spend, disk pressure, network drops, liveness, and GPU metrics are exposed so capacity planning can be done from evidence rather than vibes.
Addressing you can keep. BYOIP lets you run your own IPv4 prefix on ZEC with your own origin ASN (RPKI-gated). Existing allow-lists, sender reputation, and partner integrations stay intact when workloads move in.
Dual-stack where it matters. Cross-region private traffic carries both IPv4 and IPv6 inside the same VPC.
No middle layer
The product surface is intentionally small and concept-light. When something cannot be exposed as a knob, support routes the issue straight to engineering. We do not put a translation layer between you and the people who can actually fix things.
You see this in the product:
Small, deliberate concept surface. Cross-region connectivity exposes exactly one knob (the committed bandwidth per region pair) — no Region Links, no peering objects, no routes to install. Subnets reach each other within a VPC as soon as they exist.
Managed objects, not toolkits. NAT Gateway, Border Gateway, and the DDoS pipeline are managed components you configure, not boxes you patch. Redundancy is internal to each.
Predictable billing shapes. Where rates are committed (cross-region bandwidth, Flat Rate), they're a ceiling and a floor you can plan against. Where usage is metered (Data Transfer, 95th-percentile), the meter is documented, not buried.
Support that escalates. Issues that can't be resolved at the product surface don't sit in a tier queue — they're routed to the engineers who built the thing.
Why Use Zenlayer Elastic Compute
Elastic compute capacity — add, resize, or release instances in any covered region without re-platforming. The Global VPC already has a subnet there, so expansion is a launch action, not a network project.
Rich bandwidth choices at competitive prices — Data Transfer, Flat Rate, and Aggregated Burstable 95th are all first-class options per EIP, with committed rates and aggregated pools priced to match how real workloads use the network — not a single metered default.
A full public-cloud product, not a VPS stitched together — VPC, EIP, NAT Gateway, Border Gateway, DDoS, BYOIP, snapshots, and a global private backbone are all built in as managed components. This is public-cloud surface area held to public-cloud build standards, not a handful of hosts in colocation fronted by a self-managed private cloud.
Performance and stability as the foundation — current-generation AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hosts, NVMe block storage, dedicated GPU families, default-on DDoS protection, and honest per-instance metrics. The substrate is engineered to stay out of your way so the application is the only thing you have to reason about.
Learn More
Before you start, the following product guides are worth a read.
Public-Network Bandwidth — Data Transfer, Flat Rate, and Aggregated Burstable 95th: when to use which, how they're priced, and how bandwidth caps shape traffic.
NAT Gateway — regional managed NAT for outbound egress without an EIP per instance, plus DNAT for inbound port mapping.
Cross-Region Network — the Global VPC, per-region auto-provisioned subnets, and raising cross-region bandwidth per region pair.
Border Gateway — BGP-speaking edge router for reaching other VPCs, other clouds, and on-premises networks over Zenlayer's global private connectivity infrastructure.
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