Comparing IBM Cloud classic and VPC infrastructure environments

Compare the key differences between IBM Cloud® infrastructure environments to decide which one is best for your workloads and applications. Check out this video to learn more about the differences between the classic and VPC infrastructures.

If you aren't familiar with the environment types, review the following descriptions.

The classic infrastructure is the existing IaaS platform. This environment is best for lift and shift workloads so you can move applications quickly and keep the same architecture.
VPC infrastructure is the new IaaS platform, based on software-defined networking and ideal for cloud-native applications.

Compute differentiators

See the following table for the Compute differences between classic and VPC.

Table 1. Compute comparison
This table has row and column headers. The row headers identify possible features. The column headers identify the differentiators between classic infrastructure and VPC infrastructure. To understand the differences between environments, go to the row and find the details for the feature that you're interested in.
Category	Classic infrastructure	VPC infrastructure
Services	Full catalog of services, such as Bare Metal Servers, Virtual Servers instances, VMware, SAP	Virtual Servers and Bare Metal Servers
Performance and availability		Better availability is achievable through zone architecture
Pricing	Hourly and monthly billing, plus suspend billing features	Hourly, suspend billing, and sustained usage discount
Virtual server families	Public, dedicated, transient, reserved	Public, dedicated
Profiles	All profiles, including the GPU profiles	Balanced, compute, memory profiles with higher RAM and vCPU options
Supported images	Full set of pre-stock images, plus custom images	Limited set of pre-stock images, plus the ability to import a custom image
Platform integration		IAM and resource group integration for a unified experience

Suspend billing supports only hourly, SAN instances that are provisioned with a public profile from one of the Balanced, Compute, Memory, or Variable compute families.

Network differentiators

See the following table for the Networking differences between classic and VPC.

Table 2. Network comparison
This table has row and column headers. The row headers identify possible features. The column headers identify the differentiators between classic infrastructure and VPC infrastructure. To understand the differences between environments, go to the row and find the details for the feature that you're interested in.
Category	Classic infrastructure	VPC infrastructure
Location construct	Data centers and PODs (Might require VLAN spanning to connect two different pods or data centers, and purchasing gateways to control and route traffic)	Regional model that abstracts infrastructure so you don't need to worry about pod locations.
Network functions and services	Physical and virtual appliances from multiple vendors	Cloud-native network functions (VPNs, LBaaS) (VPC isolation, dedicated resources carved out of public cloud, with more options for VPNs, LBaaS, multiple vNIC instances, and larger subnet sizes)
IP addresses	IPv6 addresses supported	IPv4 addresses only
Gateway routing	Use a virtual or physical network appliance (Virtual Router Appliance, Vyatta, Juniper vSRX, Fortinet FSA)	Traffic routing is handled by public gateway and floating IP services
Network address translation (NAT)	Use a virtual or physical network appliance (Virtual Router Appliance, Vyatta, Juniper vSRX, Fortinet FSA)	Supported by the Bring-your-own-IP (BYOIP) functionality
IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN)	Use a virtual or physical network appliance (Virtual Router Appliance, Vyatta, Juniper vSRX, Fortinet FSA)	Supported by the VPN-as-a-service offering
Elastic load balancing	Cloud Load Balancer	Load Balancer for VPC
Global load balancing	Cloud Internet Services, Citrix Netscaler MPX	Cloud Internet Services
Hybrid connectivity	NAT solution to bridge between IBM Cloud® and your IT environment	Bring your own private IP address without NAT or IPsec tunnels Note: You can enable your VPC to access classic infrastructure resources.

Storage differentiators

See the following table for the storage differences between classic and VPC.

Table 3. Storage comparison
Classic infrastructure	VPC infrastructure
Robust set of storage services, Block Storage for Classic (iSCSI), and File Storage for Classic (NFS-based) offerings. Server-side agent based Backup service with dedicated vault. Snapshot support for both offerings. Cross-regional replication. Adjustable IOPS and increasable capacity. Encryption at rest with provider- or customer-managed encryption. Volume duplication and data refresh from parent volume.	Block Storage for VPC provides primary boot disks (with basic lifecycle management), and secondary data volumes. File Storage for VPC provides NFS-based file shares. Snapshot and backup support for block volumes. Zonal replication for file shares. Adjustable IOPS and increasable capacity. Encryption at rest with provider- or customer-managed encryption. Encryption-in-transit for file shares.

Security differentiators

See the following table for the security differences between classic and VPC.

Table 4. Security comparison
Classic infrastructure	VPC infrastructure
Vyatta, Fortigate, Juniper vSRX, Security Groups for virtual servers	Security groups, Network access control lists (ACLs)

API differentiators

See the following table for the API differences between classic and VPC.

Table 5. API comparison
Classic infrastructure	VPC infrastructure
Existing SoftLayer API (SLAPI)	New developer-friendly, REST-based API

Next steps

To review all the VPC infrastructure capabilities, see About virtual private cloud. To start exploring infrastructure overall, see Building your infrastructure.