Sakura Cloud is a public cloud from SAKURA internet Inc., run in the company’s own data centers in Ishikari (Hokkaido) and Tokyo. It offers virtual servers, disks, networking, managed databases and container hosting. Anyone with a credit card can sign up and start online without talking to sales.

Internet data transfer is not charged (object storage is the exception), so a server costs only its server plan plus its disk plan. As usage grows, billing moves from hourly to daily to a fixed monthly rate, with the cheapest rate applied automatically. Stopped servers are not billed.

Everything in the control panel can also be done through the API, the usacloud command-line tool or Terraform.

Sakura Cloud is registered under the Information system Security Management and Assessment Program (ISMAP), the Japanese government’s security assessment for cloud services. The Digital Agency has also selected it for the Government Cloud program.

Customers can spread systems across the Ishikari and Tokyo regions, each with several independent zones. If a physical host fails, a failover feature automatically restores the affected virtual servers on another host.

Object storage has an Amazon S3-compatible API, so existing S3 tools and libraries can work with it.

The Koukaryoku VRT service provides virtual servers with NVIDIA H100 GPUs for training and running generative AI models. For training across several machines, the separate Koukaryoku PHY service offers dedicated physical servers.