
Scaleway ARMv8 Cloud Servers - edouardb
https://blog.online.net/2017/04/27/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-cloud-servers/
======
nik736
Scaleway can "disrupt" the industry as much as they want. As long as they
don't have a solid product it's useless for production usage (backups, weird
storage system, unpredictable network, etc.)

They should just offer cheap Xeon D VMs and not this ARM stuff. The CPU is way
too slow and the ratio is completely off, 2 of these ARM cores for 2 GB RAM?
Even a shared Xeon or Xeon D core offers better performance than those ARM
CPUs.

~~~
jameskegel
Scaleway customer here. I read a review on HN a while back that got me to buy
into their service. While on the surface, it seems like a great value, there
are inconsistencies I cannot reconcile that have kept me on DigitalOcean and
GCP since. For example, there's quite a bit of funny business going on in all
of their stock kernels, so much so that you can't even run things like Docker
or Minikube. If you try and install your own kernel mods, you'll find that an
uphill battle as well.

~~~
user5994461
Mandatory read:

[https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production-an-
his...](https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production-an-history-of-
failure/)

[https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-
upd...](https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-update/)

If you have issue with Kernels and Docker. It's not just you and it's not
entirely the fault of the provider. ;)

~~~
ryukafalz
He has some good points, but...

>All CI pipelines in the world which rely on docker setup/update or a system
setup/update are broken. It is impossible to run a system update or upgrade on
an existing system. It’s impossible to create a new system and install docker
on it.

If the loss of package repos counts as a critical outage for you, you should
be running your own package mirrors. Especially if you're not paying for
commercial support and don't have anyone to escalate issues to.

~~~
user5994461
The package repo is not lost. It is online and serving packages with corrupted
signatures.

That's a crypto error interpretable as an active MITM attack on the repo,
which causes a apt-get and subcommands to terminate abruptly with a critical
error.

Last but not least, the repository is mirrored and cached, the mirrors simply
reproduced the corrupted source repo :D

It is not a mere case of offline repository, though I can understand the
confusion ;)

~~~
ryukafalz
I'm well aware of how traditional "dumb" mirrors work (e.g. ftpsync), and
those would indeed just mirror the packages with their incorrect signatures.
But for an internal network, surely you'd want something more like aptly[0] so
you can roll back to a working version?

[0]
[https://www.aptly.info/doc/overview/](https://www.aptly.info/doc/overview/)

~~~
user5994461
aptly 1.0.0 => released on 27 march, that's exactly 1 month ago.

First commit done in 2014.

It's funny how people always mention workarounds that were non existent or non
viable at the time of the issue. ;)

I have worked on mirrors a few times in my career. I am sadly well aware than
even the best mirroring solutions are rather poor. Not gonna argue that they
have flaws. Not gonna argue that we wish for better.

~~~
ryukafalz
I suspect it was usable long before the 1.0 release - v0.1 from 2014 appears
to have had repo snapshot support:
[https://github.com/smira/aptly/tree/3f82edf5d6c50ed6988297a4...](https://github.com/smira/aptly/tree/3f82edf5d6c50ed6988297a436dfb5eb06754408)

Nonetheless, it probably wasn't nearly as stable, and certainly wasn't as
well-known then. So I'll concede that it may not have been viable at that
point.

~~~
user5994461
Honestly, it's reasonable to live with an apt outage one day a year. Any
workaround that adds critical components in the distribution chain is
guaranteed to make it worse.

The Docker crypto fuckup was quite peculiar. The distribution pipeline can't
handle that. It also broke their other repos (including ubuntu) and propagated
to the mirrors.

------
SparkyMcUnicorn
I have a $3 ARMv7 Scaleway server, and I can vouch for the unlimited
bandwidth. I've run tens of terabytes (in a single month) through it as a
torrent mirror for various Linux ISO images.

The disk speed is a bit slow, and 200mbits is a bit low, but I still wish they
had a US data center so I can use them as a fail-over host.

------
vanwalj
Great pricing, but literally no customer support. Week's ago I wanted to
change my billing address, I was surprised not to find the option within my
account settings, so I asked customer support to do so, whom replied that they
simply can't do it.

I can just close my current account, then recreate it with my new address and
of course, there is no migration tools.

~~~
dest
In my case, customer support has been very good a few months ago to change the
billing address

------
Veratyr
There are a lot of comments in here about the CPU/RAM but I think the
important thing (at least to me) is that you can obtain 200Mbit/s for 3EUR/mo.
Saturated, that's 65TB/mo, which works out to 0.00005 $/GB. Most of the big
clouds and CDNs charge on the order of 0.08 $/GB. Sure you can get unlimited
bandwidth on some of the bigger dedicated server packages but not for 3EUR/mo.

And yes, all networks are not equal. 65TB on a shitty network isn't worth as
much if it has 800ms latency or something like that but at least there's an
option.

~~~
eximius
There is a pretty great comparison of major VPS providers that looks at the
networks. Scaleways network wasn't great but very tolerable.

[https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-
compar...](https://www.webstack.de/blog/e/cloud-hosting-provider-
comparison-2017/)

~~~
Veratyr
The comparison overall is very good but ultimately not very useful to me since
the test only covers Germany (which makes sense since it's a German company
serving German customers doing the comparison). The providers vary _a lot_
when it comes to transatlantic networking and their performance within Europe
is usually very very different.

I've been testing VPNs with various combinations of source -> VPN/novpn ->
destination, where source, VPN and destination are any combination of US,
Europe and Asia and I've found that this is _really_ variable. So much so that
there are cases where you can actually improve bandwidth/latency by using a
VPN because of the network on the other side.

------
kogepathic
I am super excited for this. I've been running an ARMv7 server on Scaleway
almost since they were released.

However, I don't see any news that the new ARMv8 servers will support native
IPv6.

This is a big limitation, if you want to be IPv6 accessible now, you have to
run a 6in4 tunnel. The x86 servers (physical and VM) from Scaleway all support
native IPv6. The explanation so far was that the ARM back plane doesn't
support IPv6.

So will these new ARMv8 servers support native IPv6? Or are they build on the
same back plane as the ARMv7 servers?

Edit: It's supported, I can't read.

~~~
nik736
What advantages are you hoping to get from IPv6? It's in a broken state right
now and will be for years to come.

~~~
thraway2016
Can you elaborate on what constitutes "broken" ?

~~~
nik736
Sure, how about routes are not working or are very very slow via IPv6? Just an
example I had a problem with recently: DTAG (largest german carrier) had no
route at all to a DC in the Netherlands via IPv6. I had no option to reach
DTAG from this specific DC, which is basically most germans. It took days (!)
to get sorted.

Next example is Cogent, they had huge packet loss via IPv6 for days (we are
speaking 50%+). After a ticket was opened it was fixed very fast, but it seems
no one cares about IPv6 as long as they can put a stamp on it which says "We
support IPv6". Most people who shout for IPv6 are not even using it so I am
always a bit sceptical.

------
pawadu
Can anyone explain to an outsider why this is disruptive? Are these
significantly faster than the old x64 offerings? A lot cheaper?

For that matter, has anyone done a real-world armv8 vs. x64 benchmark?

\--

edit: would like to test them myself, unfortunately they only allow payment
through a "physical" credit card:
[https://www.scaleway.com/faq/billing/#-What-forms-of-
payment...](https://www.scaleway.com/faq/billing/#-What-forms-of-payment-do-
you-accept)

~~~
tyingq
[deleted]

Edit: Appears to be a cloud server, aka VPS, so not much to see here. Removed
the now erroneous comment. I had mentioned OVH's kimsufi, which does have
cheap (though not as cheap as these "cloud servers"), actual dedicated boxes:
[http://kimsufi.com/](http://kimsufi.com/)

~~~
slau
Scaleway is owned by Iliad. Iliad also owns Online.net. Online.net is
Kimsufi's (OVH) main competitor:

\- €8.99/mo: Intel Avoton C2350 (2x 1.7 Ghz), 4GB ECC RAM, 1x 1TB HDD or 1x
120GB SSD. 1Gbit/s unlimited.

\- €15.99/mo: Intel Avoton C2750 (8x 2.4 Ghz), 16GB ECC RAM, 1x 1TB HDD or 1x
250GB SSD. 2.5Gbit/s unlimited.

I have one of the latter ones, and it's amazing. The only problem I have with
it is that the bandwidth between Online.net and my ISP in Denmark goes through
NL-IX, and something there doesn't jive. Even though the server can easily hit
the 2Gbit/s mark, I'm barely hitting 3Mbit/s from home due to the NL-IX pipe
being overloaded.

I'm using a proxy at OVH (Kimsufi), which at least gives me 100Mbit/s (the
peering to OVH goes through HE).

Edit: If you're wondering why there are so many HDD servers available vs the
SSD ones, it's because they have been hit by a fan-of-death issue. They have
fans in their PSUs that vibrate so much (or maybe hit the resonance frequency
of the racks) that prevent the HDDs from spinning up. Online still "sells"
those broken racks, even though they have dozens if not more servers impacted
by this. The problem has been ongoing since November 2016 [1].

[1]:
[https://status.online.net/index.php?do=details&task_id=720](https://status.online.net/index.php?do=details&task_id=720)

~~~
chx
Care to point where are you getting 2.5gbit/s ?
[https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-
xc](https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc) this only has
1gbit/s. A 10gbit/s card is still awfully expensive.

~~~
slau
They are 2.5Gbit/s interfaces, as indicated on the page you linked. You get
1Gbit/s "guaranteed" bandwidth. Anything on top is just the cherry.

[https://imagebin.ca/v/3KXVRWYjcZBw](https://imagebin.ca/v/3KXVRWYjcZBw)

~~~
chx
Ah I was unaware of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-
T_and_5GBASE-T](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T)
interesting.

------
glebm
I've played around with it. These CPUs are fast enough (certainly faster than
Heroku and the like). However, ScaleWay still does not provide automated disk
backups, and manual snapshot requires you to shut down the instance first, so
I went back to Linode.

~~~
kogepathic
> However, ScaleWay still does not provide automated disk backups

Does anyone offer that at this price point? Scaleway is ridiculously cheap.
Lack of backups is par for the course for these low cost providers.

> and manual snapshot requires you to shut down the instance first

Yup, that does suck, and I wish they would fix it.

~~~
cubano
Is running a simple rsync cron backup really that tough?

Sure I understand it's suboptimal but I've always had pretty good luck with
it.

~~~
naasking
> Sure I understand it's suboptimal but I've always had pretty good luck with
> it.

"Luck" is not a feature of a backup system.

------
jameskegel
Let's challenge ourselves to not "disrupt", or "make the world a better place"
in 2017. I'm trying to stem the flow of ribbing we will get 20 years down the
line from our peers for using these types of marketing tropes.

~~~
yoodenvranx
You can add 'beautiful' to your list.

~~~
amorphid
And "modern". And "blazing fast".

"X is modern, blazing fast..."

How about we bar marketers from using adjectives all together?!

------
helge5
There is no ImageHub for the new ARM servers - the only images offered are
Ubuntu and Jessie, i.e. no readymade Docker setup.

Maybe that is obvious, but the new servers can't run Raspberry Pi3 Ubuntu
binaries. The old ARM servers also have issues with that because the Scaleway
ARM7 CPUs lacks features provided by the Raspi3 ARM CPUs (e.g. they lack
Neon).

Summary: This is not a hosted Raspi replacement :-) But still quite nice.

------
unit91
Full-stack dev here with almost no real hardware knowledge.

Why would you want to use ARM instead of X86 on a server like this? The
architecture​ switch comes with dependency headaches -- what counterbalances
those to make it worth it?

~~~
alberth
It all comes down to performance per dollar.

Currently, ARM can't touch the performance of a mid to highend x86.

But ARM is extremely cheap and a solid low to mid x86.

If top end performance isn't needed. And you have the ability to recompile
your software to run on ARM, you can't beat ARM pricing.

Just look at the OP link.

$12/mo for 8 cores.

For x86, you'd easily pay 10x that per month.

~~~
kogepathic
> $12/mo for 8 cores. > For x86, you'd easily pay 10x that per month.

Scaleway offers baremetal x86 servers with 8 cores for 17.99€/month (C2M). [0]
But they are based on Intel Atom, so the performance is quite low.

[0] [https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/](https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/)

------
no_gravity

        We currently offer Ubuntu 16.04 as base Operating System
    

I see a lot of providers offering Ubuntu these days. Is Ubuntu meanwhile more
popular with providers then Debian? And why did it become so popular? Does it
have any technical advantages over Debian or is it because many developers
have it on their local machine and therefore want the same OS on the server?

~~~
educar
Just guessing here. Ubuntu has more recent packages since Debian is very
conservative by design. Also, Ubuntu has a company backing it which can be of
great use strategically as you might collaborate/cross market etc.

~~~
c3833174
>Ubuntu has more recent packages since Debian is very conservative by design

Not really, it depends on Debian's freeze date

------
nagvx
Note that Scaleway bills in euros, not dollars, pounds, etc. They also have no
pre-paid policy, so you cannot pay a lump sum upfront to get many months
usage. This means that you could be hit by significant monthly fees if you are
paying via another currency. But of course, different banks have different
policies, and YMMV.

My €3/mo was (IIRC) more like €5/mo once conversion fees were taken into
account. This €2 flat fee would not have been a problem had I been paying for
12 months at a time, but Scaleway do not offer this, in contrast to many other
hosting providers on the market. After inquiring, I was told there was no
current plan to change this policy.

~~~
fittingin
I don't understand why you would be hit by significant monthly fees just
because you can't prepay.

You mean that you can't prepay when you think currency exchange would benefit
you? Well, if you think you're in a currency exchange sweet spot, go ahead and
exchange. Then just leave the money in your bank account for next month's
bills.

What's that? Your bank won't let you hold a balance in another currency? That
sounds like a problem with you bank, not you hosting service.

~~~
nagvx
While your point isn't invalid, having to contact my bank and work through the
process of setting this up is another layer of hassle that I don't have to
deal with on another, more flexible provider.

------
rhodrid
Reminded me of this article "Cellphone Chips Will Remake the Server World.
Period." [1] from 2013.

And also of SeaMicro [2].

Looks like the wimpy core lost this particular battle. Or maybe they only make
sense at a particular scale.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2013/01/facebook-arm-
chips/](https://www.wired.com/2013/01/facebook-arm-chips/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMicro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMicro)

------
076ae80a-3c97-4
These seem very inexpensive for the memory and storage, irrelevant of how
powerful the processor is. Looks like they'd make great little VPN servers.

~~~
vbezhenar
Why do you need memory or storage for VPN server? I would say, processor is
more of a concern, supporting multiple clients with high speed might hit a
botttleneck.

------
anilshanbhag
8GB RAM, 200GB SSD for $11.99 is significantly cheaper than linode's 8GB RAM
96GB SSD for $40. Then again all of linode's plans are cheaper than Digital
Ocean's. I am curious if this price gap is due to the cheaper ARM SoC ?

~~~
nik736
They just have higher margins. Look at OVH [0] for example, they offer not
only ARM SoCs but X64's for the same price and performance.

[0]: [https://www.ovh.de/virtual_server/vps-
ssd.xml](https://www.ovh.de/virtual_server/vps-ssd.xml)

------
NicoJuicy
I have a bunch of Windows Server key's through Bizspark, Scaleway was the
cheapest option to do hosted Windows Servers ( 5 $ / month). It takes some
effort though ( adding scaleway drivers to a windows server ISO)

Awesome

~~~
iagovar
??¿? Where does scaleway offer windows? I don't see in the their panel.

~~~
milankragujevic
They don't, I personally ran it in a VM but that took me a whole day to setup
and would break every time you upgraded the host Ubuntu system.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I was mistaken with Vultr. Sorry ( see my parent post)

------
onli
Little bit confusing in the admin interface. It seems like these new
processors replace the old C1 offer. This is the cpuinfo of the new one:

    
    
        cat /proc/cpuinfo 
        processor       : 0
        BogoMIPS        : 200.00
        Features        : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics
        CPU implementer : 0x43
        CPU architecture: 8
        CPU variant     : 0x1
        CPU part        : 0x0a1
        CPU revision    : 1
    
        processor       : 1
        BogoMIPS        : 200.00
        Features        : fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics
        CPU implementer : 0x43
        CPU architecture: 8
        CPU variant     : 0x1
        CPU part        : 0x0a1
    
    

For comparison, this was the old C1, their prior ARM offering they mention in
the blog post:

    
    
        Processor       : Marvell PJ4Bv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
        processor       : 0
        BogoMIPS        : 1332.01
    
        processor       : 1
        BogoMIPS        : 1332.01
    
        processor       : 2
        BogoMIPS        : 1332.01
    
        processor       : 3
        BogoMIPS        : 1332.01
    
        Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp vfpv3 tls 
        CPU implementer : 0x56
        CPU architecture: 7
        CPU variant     : 0x2
        CPU part        : 0x584
        CPU revision    : 2
        Hardware        : Online Labs C1
        Revision        : 0000
        Serial          : 0000000000000000
    
    
    

I take it the BogoMips are just a false info in the kernel interface.

For performance, I ran `sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=1000 run` on both
(first I tried that with max-prime=20000, but that did not finish in a
reasonable time span on the old server).

New:

    
    
        Number of threads: 1
    
        Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
        Threads started!
        Done.
    
        Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 1000
    
    
        Test execution summary:
            total time:                          0.6541s
            total number of events:              10000
            total time taken by event execution: 0.6507
            per-request statistics:
                 min:                                  0.06ms
                 avg:                                  0.07ms
                 max:                                  0.14ms
                 approx.  95 percentile:               0.06ms
    
        Threads fairness:
            events (avg/stddev):           10000.0000/0.00
            execution time (avg/stddev):   0.6507/0.00
    

Old:

    
    
        Number of threads: 1
    
        Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
        Threads started!
        Done.
    
        Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 1000
    
    
        Test execution summary:
            total time:                          10.1997s
            total number of events:              10000
            total time taken by event execution: 10.1909
            per-request statistics:
                 min:                                  1.02ms
                 avg:                                  1.02ms
                 max:                                  1.22ms
                 approx.  95 percentile:               1.02ms
    
        Threads fairness:
            events (avg/stddev):           10000.0000/0.00
            execution time (avg/stddev):   10.1909/0.00
    
    

When using the additional cores (2 for the new, 4 for the old):

New:

    
    
        Number of threads: 2
    
        Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
        Threads started!
        Done.
    
        Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 1000
    
    
        Test execution summary:
            total time:                          0.3282s
            total number of events:              10000
            total time taken by event execution: 0.6523
            per-request statistics:
                 min:                                  0.06ms
                 avg:                                  0.07ms
                 max:                                  0.28ms
                 approx.  95 percentile:               0.06ms
    
        Threads fairness:
            events (avg/stddev):           5000.0000/2.00
            execution time (avg/stddev):   0.3261/0.00
    
    

Old:

    
    
        Number of threads: 4
    
        Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
        Threads started!
        Done.
    
        Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 1000
    
    
        Test execution summary:
            total time:                          2.5527s
            total number of events:              10000
            total time taken by event execution: 10.1983
            per-request statistics:
                 min:                                  1.02ms
                 avg:                                  1.02ms
                 max:                                  5.49ms
                 approx.  95 percentile:               1.02ms
    
        Threads fairness:
            events (avg/stddev):           2500.0000/1.87
            execution time (avg/stddev):   2.5496/0.00
    
    

The new processors seem to be a lot more powerful. I run my blog on that old
C1 (that might have skewed results somewhat if they were close, but they are
not). I think I'll move it over asap.

 _Edit:_

I have another Scaleway instance that runs [https://www.pc-
kombo.de](https://www.pc-kombo.de), and is a C2S instance, which is the also
mentioned X64 offering of theirs. It is more expensive, as it has more cores,
but if matching those the ARMv8 seems to actually be faster. That's the
performance of the C2S:

    
    
        Number of threads: 1
    
        Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
        Threads started!
        Done.
    
        Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 1000
    
    
        Test execution summary:
            total time:                          0.8497s
            total number of events:              10000
            total time taken by event execution: 0.8480
            per-request statistics:
                 min:                                  0.08ms
                 avg:                                  0.08ms
                 max:                                  0.13ms
                 approx.  95 percentile:               0.08ms
    
        Threads fairness:
            events (avg/stddev):           10000.0000/0.00
            execution time (avg/stddev):   0.8480/0.00
            

With 2 threads:

    
    
        Number of threads: 2
    
        Doing CPU performance benchmark
    
        Threads started!
        Done.
    
        Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 1000
    
    
        Test execution summary:
            total time:                          0.4489s
            total number of events:              10000
            total time taken by event execution: 0.8752
            per-request statistics:
                 min:                                  0.08ms
                 avg:                                  0.09ms
                 max:                                 20.09ms
                 approx.  95 percentile:               0.08ms
    
        Threads fairness:
            events (avg/stddev):           5000.0000/23.00
            execution time (avg/stddev):   0.4376/0.01
    

Seems like I should move that as well.

------
FnuGk
These arm servers, do they use ECC ram?

~~~
rwmj
As with x86-based servers, it depends on the chipset (or SoC for ARM). For the
two APM X-gene1 based servers that I have, the answer is yes. The Cavium
ThunderX also takes ECC RAM.

------
rb808
Slightly OT but can anyone recommend ARM servers for home use? I have x86
server but is too noisy and overpowered, and a raspberry pi which is too weak.
Can someone recommend some hardware in-between?

~~~
floatboth
RPi 3 with an overclock isn't as weak as the previous ones… and you can boot
it over network or USB. Still, the lack of SATA and Gigabit Ethernet is
disappointing.

So I currently use a Mac mini '06 as my home server. Used to be my main
desktop back in the day… I upgraded the CPU (Core Duo → Core 2 Duo), flashed
the firmware from the '07 model (allows running OS X Lion, but idk if that did
anything else), installed an SSD (yeah, SATA 1 limits the bandwidth, but
latency is sooo much better & I was slightly concerned about the old drive
failing) and installed HardenedBSD (because this machine has 32-bit firmware,
that was more complicated than usual — I compiled GRUB 2 for 32-bit EFI! And
that happily boots the 64-bit FreeBSD kernel. From ZFS, even.)

One downside of that machine is called "Marvell Yukon 88E8053 Gigabit
Ethernet". It just… stops working after a while:
[https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=206567](https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=206567)
So my home server is currently on Wi-Fi :D

Another thing is that you have to shove a resistor into the DVI connector to
let the machine boot w/o a display [https://soledadpenades.com/2009/02/10/mac-
mini-as-a-headless...](https://soledadpenades.com/2009/02/10/mac-mini-as-a-
headless-server/)

------
zimbatm
That's perfect to run Tor relay services on the cheap

------
Zekio
they still lack two factor auth...

