# Compute quickstart

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Mithril is generally available for work purposes. Individual users will be waitlisted for now.
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## Create a reservation or spot bid

Once you've set up your account and determined which instance type you'd like to use, you're ready to create your first reservation or spot bid!

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### Start

From the **Price chart** or **Instances** page, select **Create instances**.
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### Choose if you'd like to create a reservation or a spot bid. 

Reservations give you guaranteed access to your instances for a set period of time. Spot bids allow you to use unreserved capacity as preemptible instances whenever the spot price is below the limit price that you set in your bid. See [Compute overview](/compute-and-storage/compute-overview.md) for additional information.
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### Choose instance options and configuration

For step-by-step guides on creating reservations and spot bids, see [Reserving compute](/compute-and-storage/reserving-compute.md) and [Spot bids](/compute-and-storage/spot-bids.md), respectively.

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To attach persistent storage to your instances in this step, you must first provision storage in the same region. For details on provisioning persistent storage, see [Persistent storage](/compute-and-storage/persistent-storage.md).
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### Check the status of your reservation or spot bids

Once you've submitted your reservation or bid, navigate to the **Instances** tab. Here, you can see all of your currently allocated instances. You can see the status of entire reservations and spot bids under the **Reservations** and **Spot Bids** tabs, respectively.
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### Access your instances 🎉

Once your instance shows a status of <mark style="color:green;">`Allocated`</mark> you can access it with the selected SSH keys. You can click on the instance name to review details about the instance, including the selected SSH keys.
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