
Scaleway is retiring its ARM instances - Abishek_Muthian
https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/migrate-c2-arm64-to-virtual-instance-using-rsync/
======
floatboth
Congratulations AWS, now your only competition in the "public cloud arm64"
space died. F.

As much as I don't like the Awful Bezos Monopoly and their bandwidth pricing
and stuff, the Graviton has been excellent and now the super-fast Graviton2 is
coming. While Scaleway couldn't unbreak something as basic as _booting a local
EFI file instead of iPXE_ for months [1] AWS employees have been sending
patches to upstream OSes [2] so it's pretty obvious which provider is serious
about ARM. Hopefully there will be more than one. HuaweiCloud should put the
Kunpeng instances in the international regions. Maybe Microsoft Azure will
eventually do it too? (They've been using ARM internally..)

[1] [https://community.scaleway.com/t/freebsd-on-
arm64/6678/5](https://community.scaleway.com/t/freebsd-on-arm64/6678/5)

[2] [https://reviews.freebsd.org/D24065](https://reviews.freebsd.org/D24065)

------
altmind
>> the physical servers hosting them are indeed randomly affected by several
stability issues

this may cast a shadow on ARM64 servers credibility.

they used to design their first generation of arm servers in-house. it looked
like a blade server with slottable cpu(or was it the whole system on a micro-
board?). check the video from 2014(at the end) for some glimple on a physical
machine [https://blog.scaleway.com/2014/online-labs-public-
preview/?f...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2014/online-labs-public-
preview/?fbclid=IwAR19Ynxwvyk8qAeTB7gX4ebH4JBnnY7A0sHkAzIrplLUSzHGKkdgUAJdZyM)

------
Abishek_Muthian
The reason I have submitted the migration document instead of official
announcement is because there isn't any as of writing.

I received a mail few hours back informing[1] that the ARM64/C2 instances
would be retired by Dec 1 and technical support will end on Jul 1. The reason
for the retirement is vague, the email mentions 'several stability issues'.

I've personally been running one of my projects on ARM64[2] for nearly a year
and haven't had any major issues except reboot require power cycling.

The announcement sounds fishy, it's not the first time Scaleway has retired
its low tier instances[3], I suspect it do more with their Business than
actual stability. I've recommended Scaleway's ARM instances several times,
even here on HN; But now I'm reconsidering my options as I've been using ARM
for my compute needs for a while now to align with my carbon goals.

Update: Official forum discussion[4], looks like others feel the same way.

[1] Someone else have posted the email content on Reddit -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g11uuj/scaleway...](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g11uuj/scaleway_retiring_their_arm64c2_instances/)

[2][https://needgap.com](https://needgap.com)

[3][https://blog.scaleway.com/2018/introducing-scaleway-
nextgen-...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2018/introducing-scaleway-nextgen-nvme-
cloud-servers-with-hot-snapshots/)

[4][https://community.scaleway.com/t/c2-arm64-instances-end-
of-l...](https://community.scaleway.com/t/c2-arm64-instances-end-of-life/8677)

~~~
Scaleway
Thank you for your feedback and sorry for your disappointment.

As explained in our email, Scaleway’s C2 and ARM Instances suffer from random
instabilities that prevent us to keep market them, even if they were not all
impacted by these issues.

We would love to propose new ARM Instances in the future, but nothing is
planned at the moment. We’re just investigating the hardware, but be assured
that you will be kept informed.

Regards -AA

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
I appreciate the reply, but I would expect a detailed technical analysis of
the issues faced by scaleway with these instances and a more detailed
reasoning in a separate blog post.

The mention of this retirement on just the migration document seems
unforthcoming.

