Advanced Provisioning Options and Tradeoffs
Overview
While the standard provisioning flow handles 95% of use cases, enterprise workloads often require specific network or disk configurations. The Advanced Options toggle during provisioning exposes these capabilities.
Advanced Features
1. Custom VPC Selection (AWS / GCP)
By default, CloudAIPilot creates or uses a standard default VPC.
Tradeoff: If you have an existing peering connection to a corporate database, you must manually select your custom VPC here. *Note: You are responsible for ensuring the custom VPC has a public Internet Gateway so CloudAIPilot can connect.*
2. Dedicated IP vs Shared
Some cloud providers offer cheaper, shared-IP instances.
Tradeoff: Shared IPs save money but cannot host SSL certificates directly on standard ports without reverse proxies. We strongly recommend Dedicated IPs for production web servers.
3. High-Performance Block Storage (NVMe/IOPS)
By default, we select standard SSDs.
Tradeoff: If you are provisioning a dedicated database server, expanding the Advanced Disk settings to select Provisioned IOPS (e.g., AWS io2) will vastly improve database write performance, but will increase your monthly cloud bill.
Human-in-the-Loop FinOps
If you select highly expensive advanced options (like 64-core instances with Provisioned IOPS), the FinOps engine will tag this server. If it remains underutilized, you will receive an Approval Card suggesting a downgrade to save costs.