Droplets are virtual machines managed by Uncloud. Under the hood, each Droplet is a KubeVirt VirtualMachine resource running on your Kubernetes cluster.

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How Droplets Work

When you create a Droplet:
  1. A record is created in SQLite with status provisioning
  2. The sync loop picks it up and creates a KubeVirt VirtualMachine CRD
  3. KubeVirt schedules the VM on an available node
  4. The sync loop pulls the runtime status (IP addresses, phase) back to SQLite
  5. The Droplet status transitions to running

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Droplet Lifecycle

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Plans (Instance Types)

Droplets are sized using plans that define CPU, memory, and disk:

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Images (Operating Systems)

Supported OS images include:
  • Ubuntu — 22.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS
  • Debian — 12, 11
  • CentOS — Stream 9
  • Fedora — 39
  • Rocky Linux — 9
  • Alpine — 3.19

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Features

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SSH Access

Inject SSH public keys at creation time. Keys are embedded into the VM’s cloud-init configuration.

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VNC Console

Access a graphical console for any Droplet directly through the dashboard or API. Useful for debugging boot issues or when SSH isn’t available.

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Live Resizing

Change the plan (CPU/memory) of a running Droplet. The VM is updated in place when possible, or restarted if needed.

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Snapshots

Create point-in-time snapshots of a Droplet’s disk. Snapshots can be used to restore a Droplet to a previous state or to create new Droplets from a known-good image.

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Metrics

Monitor CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O, and network traffic via the built-in metrics API, powered by Prometheus and the Kubernetes Metrics Server.

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Tags

Apply arbitrary key-value tags to Droplets for organization and filtering.

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Kubernetes Mapping