# Shelf Cloud

> Dedicated cores, unmetered bandwidth, honest pricing — priced live against the market, never above it.

Shelf Cloud sells dedicated-core VMs on hardware it owns, bought on the
auction market and allocated ahead of demand. The API is EC2-compatible:
the same request shapes, signing, error codes and pagination, so existing
AWS SDKs and Terraform providers work against it unchanged.

Every page below is also available as Markdown at `<url>.md`. The whole
reference concatenated: https://shelfcs.com/llms-full.txt

## ACCOUNT — CLOUD

- [Access keys](https://shelfcs.com/docs/account/cloud/access-keys.md): How to get the EC2 access key pair that SigV4 signs with, where it really lives, and the one way it does not behave like AWS.
- [Account API](https://shelfcs.com/docs/account/cloud/storefront-api-reference.md): Five endpoints — catalog, prices, me, onboard, billing portal. The front door between a signup and a cloud tenancy.
- [Quotas and limits](https://shelfcs.com/docs/account/cloud/quotas-and-limits.md): What a new account may consume, what sets it, what is not capped at all, and why the ceilings can never add up to more than the box.
- [Usage and cost](https://shelfcs.com/docs/account/cloud/usage-and-cost.md): GET /v1/usage — what you are running and what the month has cost so far, the two hours of lag you must design around, and the machine console call beside it.

## ACCOUNT — GUIDE

- [Account developer guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/account/guide/developer-guide.md): Driving the account API from code — sessions and token refresh, idempotent onboarding, minting keys, reading usage, caching, CORS and error shapes.
- [Account user guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/account/guide/user-guide.md): From signing up to having a cloud tenancy — what onboarding creates, the two passwords, where the bill lives, and the one boundary you get.

## BILLING — GUIDE

- [Billing developer guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/guide/developer-guide.md): Reading prices, stock and cost from code — which endpoint answers what, the null price that is not free, month-to-date usage, and the rated rows behind a total.
- [Billing user guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/guide/user-guide.md): What you pay for, what is currently free and why that will change, how the price is worked out, and where the invoice lives.

## BILLING — PRICING

- [Catalog and availability](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/pricing/catalog-and-availability.md): The two public endpoints behind the shop window — what is for sale, whether it is actually in stock right now, and what the same machine costs elsewhere.
- [How a period is billed](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/pricing/how-a-period-is-billed.md): The guarantees behind your invoice — one row per hour, frozen once billed, never billed twice, and what happens when a rate changes after the fact.
- [How prices are set](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/pricing/how-prices-are-set.md): One rule, computed not typed — the cheapest current-generation AWS equivalent in London, less 20 percent, in euros.
- [Metering and invoicing](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/pricing/metering-and-invoicing.md): the metering agent meters, the time-series store stores, the rating service rates, Stripe invoices — what happens to your usage every hour, and where you read the bill.
- [Provider rate feed](https://shelfcs.com/docs/billing/pricing/provider-rate-feed.md): GET /v1/prices/rates — every dimension of the bill at every other provider, each rate carrying the vendor URL it was read from.

## Compute — EC2

- [Shelf Cloud EC2 API Reference](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/api-reference-welcome.md): Endpoint, protocol, API version and how to read this reference
- [Common errors](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/api-reference-common-errors.md): The error envelope, the HTTP status of each error class, and every shared error code
- [DescribeImages](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-describe-images.md): List the images you can launch — parameters, filters, response elements, and what "the name rolls" means for a pipeline that pins an id.
- [DescribeInstances](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-describe-instances.md): List and inspect instances — parameters, the filters that work and the ones that are refused, every response element, states, and pagination.
- [EC2 API actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/api-reference-actions.md): Every action the EC2 API implements, and every AWS action it does not
- [Image and catalogue actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-images-and-catalogue.md): DescribeImages, DescribeInstanceTypes, DescribeRegions, DescribeAvailabilityZones.
- [Instance metadata and user data](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-instance-metadata-and-user-data.md): How a machine learns who it is — the config drive we force on every instance, what 169.254.169.254 does and does not do here, and why a green launch is not a working VM.
- [Instance types](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-instance-types.md): Every shape we sell, its size, its AWS alias, and the equivalents on GCP, Azure, Alibaba, IBM and OVH.
- [Key pair actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-key-pairs.md): CreateKeyPair, ImportKeyPair, DescribeKeyPairs, DeleteKeyPair.
- [Machine images](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-machine-images.md): The eleven images on the shelf, the login user for each, the minimum root disk, and what "the name rolls" means for your pipeline.
- [Making requests](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/api-reference-making-requests.md): Request structure, signing, retries, eventual consistency and idempotency
- [Networking](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-networking.md): The network, subnet and router every customer project gets at onboarding, the default VPC on top of them, security groups, and where addresses come from.
- [Pagination](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/api-reference-pagination.md): Which actions paginate, how tokens behave, and why an empty page is not the end
- [RunInstances](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-run-instances.md): Launch instances — every parameter, what is accepted, what is refused, the response, the errors, and worked examples in CLI, Terraform and boto3.
- [Snapshot actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-snapshots.md): CreateSnapshot, DescribeSnapshots, DeleteSnapshot — what a snapshot really guarantees, how to restore from one, and the capacity it quietly consumes.
- [StartInstances, StopInstances, RebootInstances](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-start-stop-instances.md): Change the run state of an instance, and what each transition costs.
- [Tag actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-tags.md): CreateTags, DeleteTags, DescribeTags, and tagging at creation.
- [TerminateInstances](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-terminate-instances.md): Destroy instances permanently, what goes with them, and what the response reports.
- [Volume actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/ec2/ec2-api-volumes.md): CreateVolume, DescribeVolumes, AttachVolume, DetachVolume, ModifyVolume, DeleteVolume, DescribeVolumeStatus — over the block-storage service, with the storage this hardware actually delivers.

## Compute — GUIDE

- [Compute cheat sheet](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/guide/cheat-sheet.md): Every command you need on one page — setup, launch, connect, storage, teardown, and the four errors you will actually hit.
- [Compute developer guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/guide/developer-guide.md): Working with the compute API itself — endpoint, credentials, signing a request, pagination, idempotency, error handling, and code examples in four languages.
- [Compute user guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/compute/guide/user-guide.md): Getting started with compute — what a machine is made of, how to go from an account to something running, and what you have to do yourself.

## Identity and access — IAM

- [Welcome](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-welcome.md): Endpoint, signing region, API version, and the authorisation model in one paragraph.
- [Access key actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-access-keys.md): CreateAccessKey, ListAccessKeys, UpdateAccessKey, DeleteAccessKey, GetAccessKeyLastUsed.
- [Actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-actions.md): GetAccessKeyLastUsed exists so that a customer can rotate keys safely: it is
- [Data types](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-data-types.md): Every type the IAM API returns, field by field, with mutability stated.
- [IAM API errors](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-errors.md): The IAM error envelope and every code the service returns.
- [IAM requests, responses and pagination](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-making-requests.md): The IAM wire format, its response envelopes, and its pagination model.
- [Policy actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-policies.md): Managed policies, inline policies, attachment, and policy versions.
- [Policy reference](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-policy-reference.md): This page is the most consequential in the whole v1 documentation set. Every
- [User and group actions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/iam/api-reference-users-and-groups.md): CreateUser, GetUser, ListUsers, UpdateUser, DeleteUser, and the group actions.

## Identity and access — KEYSTONE

- [Identity, as deployed](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/keystone/identity-as-deployed.md): What actually authenticates you today — the identity service users, projects and one role — and how each AWS IAM concept maps onto it, or does not.

## Identity and access — STS

- [Shelf Cloud STS API Reference](https://shelfcs.com/docs/identity/sts/api-reference-welcome.md): The identity endpoint every client calls first, and why it exists separately from IAM.

## Platform — CONSOLE

- [Web console and VNC](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/console/web-console-and-vnc.md): the web console at console.shelfcs.com and the noVNC instance console — the two ways to see a machine without SSH.

## Platform — API conventions

- [Accounts and tenancy](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/accounts-and-tenancy.md): The account boundary, visibility rules, and the account lifecycle
- [API versioning](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/api-versioning.md): How versions are identified per protocol, what is breaking, and how deprecation works
- [ARNs and identifiers](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/arns-and-identifiers.md): The ARN grammar, the partition, account ids, resource ids, and where the rules differ
- [Authentication](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/authentication.md): SigV4 signing, credential scope, clock skew, and the rules a verifier must follow
- [Endpoints and regions](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/endpoints-and-regions.md): How endpoints are constructed, what regions and zones mean, and which services are global.
- [Errors](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/errors.md): Error envelopes, HTTP status codes, shared codes, and what an error must never reveal
- [Idempotency](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/idempotency.md): Client tokens, which operations accept them, and how a retry is made safe
- [Metering events](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/metering-events.md): The usage record, its fields, and its interval semantics.
- [Pagination](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/pagination.md): Which operations paginate, token behaviour, and the empty-page trap
- [Requests and responses](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/requests-and-responses.md): Request structure, headers, request ids, retries, consistency and throttling
- [Time, numbers and money](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/conventions/time-numbers-and-money.md): Timestamp formats, units, and the exact representation of money

## Platform — ENDPOINTS

- [Service endpoints](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/endpoints/service-endpoints.md): The eleven hostnames this cloud publishes, what speaks each one, and how they differ from the endpoint shape the conventions page proposes.

## Platform — SECURITY

- [Credentials and trust](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/security/credentials-and-trust.md): Which of your secrets this platform can hand back to you, what that means for blast radius, and where the real trust boundaries are.
- [What we verify before selling it](https://shelfcs.com/docs/platform/security/verified-claims.md): Three checks that must pass before this platform will serve — the hardware is as big as the catalog claims, every alias tells the truth about size, and no allocation oversells the box.

## STORAGE — BLOCK

- [Volume types](https://shelfcs.com/docs/storage/block/volume-types.md): The one block-storage type we sell, the performance it delivers, how that figure was measured, and where it is not yet enforced.

## STORAGE — GUIDE

- [Storage developer guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/storage/guide/developer-guide.md): Working with the volume API — the calls in order, the states you must wait for, the retry trap that bills you twice, and code for the whole attach-format-mount cycle.
- [Storage user guide](https://shelfcs.com/docs/storage/guide/user-guide.md): Getting started with block storage — what a volume is, root disk against attached volume, sizing for the hardware you actually have, and what you must do yourself.

## Site

- [Pricing](https://shelfcs.com/pricing)
- [Support](https://shelfcs.com/support)
- [Terms](https://shelfcs.com/terms)