The 2nth.ai compute tier on Google Cloud covers the full spectrum — from a scale-to-zero container that costs you nothing when idle, to a persistent VM running a self-hosted ERP, to a GPU instance serving your own AI models. Every workload runs in africa-south1, protected by the same defence-in-depth pattern the hyperscalers use for their own platforms.
Most modern applications want serverless containers — deploy once, let the platform handle scaling and billing. Some workloads need full virtual machines — persistent state, a specific kernel, or a GPU. 2nth uses both, picked per workload, not per opinion.
Ship a container, get a global HTTPS URL. No servers to patch, no scaling to configure, no idle cost.
Full Linux or Windows VMs with persistent disks. You choose the kernel, the libraries, the tuning.
Real workloads 2nth runs or is ready to run on this tier. Each one picks serverless or VM based on what the workload actually needs — not by rule.
Run your own ERP, fully in SA, on your own schedule. Wake on demand, sleep between sessions, auto-backup to regional storage. Freedom from subscription traps and offshore data.
Public APIs that scale from zero to a product launch. Pay for requests you actually serve. Fronted by Cloudflare for DDoS, rate limiting, and edge auth.
ETL pipelines, monthly reports, mail digests, data reconciliation. Triggered on schedule, run to completion, cost nothing for the other 23 hours.
Self-hosted models where data can't leave SA, or Gemini / Claude via Vertex AI for the heavy lifting. Streaming responses, structured output, tool calls.
Endpoints that receive events from Slack, WhatsApp, Stripe, Meta, Gmail, GitHub, Zoho. Parse, classify with AI, fan out via Pub/Sub, write to your systems.
Ops dashboards, admin UIs, custom reports. Gated by Cloudflare Access, hosted privately, visible only to named team identities — no public surface at all.
Illustrative monthly numbers for the workload shapes above. Not quotes — indicative cost ranges based on published GCP pricing for africa-south1. Real numbers depend on traffic, data transfer, and committed-use discounts.
The shape that matters: most 2nth workloads spend more time idle than active. Scale-to-zero + spot pricing + 1-year commits together usually cut total cost by 50–70% vs running 24/7 on reserved capacity. For anything that isn't always-on, serverless is effectively free until real users show up.
Google Cloud gives you the primitives. 2nth gives you the opinionated wiring — the hybrid with Cloudflare, the POPIA posture, the operational patterns, and the skills tree that lets an AI agent help operate what we build together.
Every service in Johannesburg, every byte under POPIA. No "data might leave the country" asterisks.
DDoS, WAF, bot management, rate limiting, and caching handled at the global edge — your compute never sees malicious traffic.
No public IPs, no open ports. Every internal call is authenticated by identity; every external call is filtered at the edge.
Scale-to-zero is the default, spot + commitments are layered where they fit. Most workloads settle well below equivalent hyperscale pricing.
From a container image to a live HTTPS URL in under 90 seconds. From a git push to production in under 5 minutes.
Every skill node lives in an AI-readable knowledge tree. Penny and the other 2nth agents can operate what we build together — from deploy to incident.
If you're a South African business that needs serious cloud infrastructure without losing data residency or paying for idle capacity, we'd like to talk. Compute is just the start.