CloudBroker: An API That Knows the Price of Every VM Across Multiple Clouds #
The problem and the product: one place to ask "what's cheapest?"
You need a 4 vCPU / 8 GB machine. AWS shows one price, Hetzner another, Scaleway another — different sites, currencies, terms. Doing that once is tedious; doing it automatically at scale is impossible without a single, normalized source. CloudBroker is that source: ingest from multiple providers, one schema, one request with constraints, one ranked answer. No provisioning, no Kubernetes — just "here are my constraints; what do you recommend?"
The price-comparison problem
Multi-cloud is real; comparison is manual. Each provider has a different API, different currencies, different update cycles. Cost control and vendor flexibility depend on knowing the options. Checking four provider consoles every time you need a VM doesn't scale. Scripts that scrape pricing pages break when the pages change. What teams need is one place that already has the numbers and can answer: "What's the cheapest VM that fits these specs, in this region, under this price?"
One API to rule them all
CloudBroker aggregates AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, Scaleway, DigitalOcean, OVH, Aruba, UpCloud, Open Telekom Cloud, Exoscale, IONOS, gridscale, STACKIT, Elastx, Cyso Cloud, and Seeweb. One database, one request/response. You send constraints — min vCPU, min RAM, architecture, region (e.g. EU only), max price per hour in EUR, allowed providers — and get back a ranked list of instance types and regions. It does not create or delete VMs. It only answers "what do you recommend?"
Why separate this from "the thing that provisions"?
Pricing and scoring can evolve without touching a provisioner. The API is reusable: called by a Kubernetes controller (e.g. Cloudburst Autoscaler), a script, or a dashboard. Consumers can be anything that needs "cheapest VM for these constraints." Keeping the recommendation service separate means one team can own pricing logic and many systems can consume it.
The next piece explains how CloudBroker gets its data: ingestion and the data model.