Compute providers and ordering hosts

Compute providers are Loopback’s abstraction for where servers come from: cloud APIs (Hetzner Cloud, IONOS DCD) or dedicated providers (Hetzner Robot). Hosts are the resulting machines in your workspace, ordered by choosing a compute profile.

Concepts

Compute provider
Stores credentials and configuration for an external API (token, project id, region, etc.). Often created or seeded by operators; some flows let organizations claim free pool providers.

Compute profile
A productized server SKU: CPU/RAM/disk class, price references, and provider-specific parameters (e.g. server type id). Profiles are global catalog objects marked active.

Host
A machine record tied to organization + workspace, with lifecycle state, networking, and eventually Kubernetes join metadata when part of a cluster.

Supported provider families (codebase)

The routes and engines cover at least:

Hetzner Cloud — virtual cloud instances; datacenter availability may be checked live when listing profiles.
Hetzner Robot — dedicated servers; inventory is provider-specific.
IONOS DCD — cloud API with region parameters on provider creation.

Your operator may enable only a subset.

End-to-end: ordering a host

Ensure workspace exists and you have host create permission.
List compute profiles for the workspace — pricing may reflect billing agreement overrides.
POST host create with:
- hostname
- compute_profile id
- optional metadata
Loopback enqueues provider-specific tasks (provision server, configure networking, run bootstrap).
For Kubernetes workspaces, later stages may run kubeadm join using a token produced on control plane nodes.

Failure modes

No capacity in provider region → error from API or stuck host in error state.
Invalid profile for provider token → validation error.
Quota or organization limit → limit error.

Provider credentials and security

API tokens live in encrypted secret storage.
Least-privilege: use project/workspace-scoped automation accounts on the cloud side where possible.

Relationship to Kubernetes workspace creation

When you create a Kubernetes workspace, you pick a compute provider type for management pool selection (Hetzner vs IONOS) — that is about where tenant control planes run, not necessarily the same token as your worker hosts.