
Scaleway C2 and ARM64 instances will reach end-of-life in December 2020 - alexellisuk
https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/migrate-c2-arm64-to-virtual-instance-using-rsync/
======
pbuBMRh3
The C2 bare metal offer is based on the Atom C2000 series, which has the AVR54
errata. They are based on in-house custom hardware [1] and are no longer
manufactured. The switching fabric used in this offering only supports
stateless firewalls, creating a huge issue of feature parity between
offerings. The switch fabric is part of the hardware design, so it is
impossible to replace it with something that would support dynamic firewalls.

The ARM64 offering is based on ThunderX servers from Gigabyte / Cavium. These
servers were plagued by kernel panics from the first kernels provided by
Cavium and firmware bugs that had never been fully resolved before the servers
went into production. They were also plagued by consumer-grade 1TB SSDs that
were constantly crapping the bed and losing customer data (unlike the other
1.92TB enterprise SSDs installed, which were robust).

Offer C1 is also based on custom hardware [2] and faces the same situation as
offer C2. If you are an existing C1 customer, I would take a backup and
consider alternatives.

I don't find it very surprising that they announced the withdrawal of these
offers, you can check their GitHub repositories to see years of neglect to
these products: operating system images rarely updated [3], and major
usability issues have never been solved [4].

(Throwaway account to protect sources)

[1] [https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/c2-insanely-
affordable-x64-se...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/c2-insanely-
affordable-x64-servers/)

[2] [https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/from-online-labs-to-
scaleway/](https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/from-online-labs-to-scaleway/)

[3] [https://github.com/scaleway/image-
fedora/issues/34](https://github.com/scaleway/image-fedora/issues/34)

[4] [https://github.com/scaleway/image-
ubuntu/issues/87](https://github.com/scaleway/image-ubuntu/issues/87)

------
progval
A few days ago, Scaleway sent this in a mail to all customers:

> Dear customer, > As of December 1 st, 2020, our C2 and ARM64 Instances will
> reach their end-of-life. The physical servers hosting them are indeed
> randomly affected by several stability issues, which prevent us from fully
> guaranteeing the overall quality of service. Rest assured, however, that we
> are committed to guiding you in your migration and provide you with the best
> matching resources for improved stability, performance and reliability.

> Starting from April 14th, 2020, it is no longer possible to create new C2
> and ARM64 Instances. In addition, their support will end on July 1st, 2020.
> As a result, our technical assistance will no longer address issues related
> to those instances. A price increase is also to be expected on July 1st,
> 2020. Lastly, C2 and ARM64 Instances will be completely deprovisioned as of
> December 1st, 2020. > > As a reminder, C2 and ARM64 instances include: C2S,
> C2M, C2L ARM64-2G, ARM64-4G, ARM64-8G, ARM64-16G, ARM64-32G, ARM64-64G,
> ARM64-128G

> You will find below our recommandations to migrate to both our Virtual
> Instances or our Bare Metal cloud servers.

> [...]

They don't explain it further; but I used several ARM64 instances and they
mostly worked. The main issue I had is that they sometimes took hours to stop,
which meant they were stuck in a state where you couldn't access the data or
free any resource related to the instance.

------
jedisct1
We can't really blame them for having tried.

That was a killer idea. Get dedicated hardware, with all the security and
performance consistency it implies, for even cheaper than a VM instance.

And when it was introduced, it was really a game changer. And it worked really
well.

Unfortunately, Docker images were and still are mostly for x86_64, and that
didn't make adoption easy in spite of their efforts to help improve the
situation.

The hardware eventually didn't prove to be as reliable as expected, so moving
to more traditional hardware was a safe route to go.

Sad, but the instance types they have remain very compelling. The DEV1-S
instance is only $2.99, with unmetered bandwidth.

I just moved two ARM64 instances to a DEV1-S. Same price, and even though that
instance type has only 2 virtual cores instead of 4, it is actually much
snappier ARM64 instances. Plus, I can scale up if necessary, while that wasn't
really an option with ARM64 CPUs.

------
bhouston
C2 introduced in April 2017 it appears:

[https://blog.scaleway.com/2017/scaleway-disruptive-
armv8-clo...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2017/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-cloud-
servers/)

The C1 was introduced in 2013.

And now Scaleway's Arm experiment is over?

~~~
Hamuko
Wasn't Scaleway originally Online's ARM experiment anyways? Now Online is just
called Scaleway and has no ARM instances.

------
ksec
I wonder why?

Cavium ThunderX; Now under Marvell, has a newer ThunderX2 and an upcoming X3
[1]. Since they explicitly mentioned ARM64 it seems they are giving up the
ARM64 Server business as a whole.

I was surprised when they launch C1 / ARM Offering so early in 2013, and would
have expected the experiment to end in a few years time, but to discontinue
ARM64 _after_ AWS announced they are going All in, seems _something_. ( Sigh,
my limited lexicon. Cant find the right word. )

[1] [https://www.servethehome.com/marvell-thunderx3-arm-server-
cp...](https://www.servethehome.com/marvell-thunderx3-arm-server-cpu-
with-768-threads-in-2020/)

~~~
eythian
I have a C2 with them, and find that whenever I try to reboot it from within
the VPS, it kernel panics rather than reboots. This makes automated security
updates requiring reboot problematic (this is a small personal server for
running nextcloud, I don't care if it has a couple of minutes downtime in the
early morning, but turning off and not turning back on again is more
annoying.)

I don't know for sure if this was the issue that caused them to stop, but I
expect if there was this and other issues that were hard to solve or kept
cropping up, they perhaps just decided it was trouble than it was worth.

~~~
justinclift
For that specific issue (the reboot one on C2), it seems to be cause by an
interaction between xnbd-client and systemd:

[https://github.com/scaleway/image-
ubuntu/issues/87#issuecomm...](https://github.com/scaleway/image-
ubuntu/issues/87#issuecomment-452657495)

------
londons_explore
Google, who is frequently criticised for killing projects, guarantees cloud
services for at least one year from the announcement of deprecation, and
typically gives much longer.

Scaleway gave _zero_ notice of the removal of the ability to start ARM64
instances. That means if you had a CI pipeline or automated system which
started those instances, it just broke on you. Hope your clients don't mind
random downtime!

You're going to have to port all your code to x64 or another cloud provider to
restore service. That could take weeks. Weeks of downtime!

Don't touch Scaleway, ever, especially if you want an SLA.

~~~
sgt
I guess most companies could easily just run their code on x64 without porting
necessary. How many clients would have ARM64-specific code running that
absolutely would not run on x64? What Scaleway did is not ideal, but I think
you are blowing it out of proportion.

~~~
khuey
How many people with generic non-ARM specific code would bother running it on
an ARM instance?

~~~
floatboth
I run my website on an AWS a1 instance, but I'm not many people :D

But really the answer is "enough people for Amazon to invest heavily in
manufacturing custom CPUs"

------
d99kris
That's too bad, there aren't too many companies offering ARM-based VPS'es. I
ended up getting a Scaleway account as late as last month, for the sole reason
of using their ARM64 instances. Needed it for debugging some user-reported
ARM-specific bug in one of my side projects.

Their ARM64 instances were actually disabled for new users, and required
submitting an IT-ticket to be enabled. I thought it was strange at the time,
but now with the EOL notice I guess it makes sense.

------
fs111
I ran an alpine/arm tor node on scaleway for a while, but I had often problems
with filesystem corruption and general stability. I don’t know if it was
alpine or the arm server or both, but it was not a super stable setup. Their
x64 boxes are more stable.

~~~
sgzfx
This is definitely not an ARM-only problem, I also had the same issues for
years with both ARM64 and C2.

I deleted my Scaleway account last year after migrating all of my resources
over to DO and other providers. I was sick of having to deal with randomly
losing access to my servers in intervals of less than half a year.

Now that they're nuking C2 and ARM64 because of stability issues, from a pure
price for performance perspective it would make sense for me to return to
using their services.. but after my experience battling those issues with
their support, it's unlikely.

~~~
fs111
I can highly recommend hetzner cloud. I run all my new stuff there. Great
hardware, good connectivity, good prices, and okay UI to do things in:
[https://www.hetzner.de/cloud](https://www.hetzner.de/cloud)

------
celicaraptor
Just moved from Scaleway to Hetzner's new AMD Epyc VPSs.Will see how it turns
out.The CPX11 for 4.19/month seems a bargain.Their network seem a little slow
though...With scaleway i was getting consistently Gigabit D/U.Now i sometimes
get below 100mbps on hetzner.

~~~
angristan
Since the new AMD VMs from Hetzner have similar pricing to Scaleway's DEV
instances, I did some Geekbench tests:

\- Hetzner EPYC Rome: 600/1900 \- Scaleway EPYC Zen (DEV): 526/1844

Not much difference for a generation bump. But still, good value!

Other offers:

\- Scaleway EPYC Zen (GP): 826/2887 \- Hetzner Xeon Skylake: 673/2325

------
gnfargbl
I also got burned by this. However, I'm going to buck the trend and say
something nice about Scaleway: I've been using their managed Kubernetes
product, Kapsule, for a few months now and I have generally been happy with
it. It's pretty cost-effective, it auto-provisions SSD block storage and, so
far, it has been reliable. No charges for the management plane at the moment
(though like GKE, that could change).

For support, they have a Slack channel: if you go in there and speak directly
to the engineer who looks after things, you generally get a pretty decent
level of service. Of course that's a totally different prospect than Google
support, but the pricing is totally different too.

~~~
simplecto
I will tip my hat to Scaleway as well. I'm in a couple of the product betas
and enjoy having access directly with the engineers via slack.

I happily host my side projects with them without too many issues. There was a
recent outage on their block storage product, and the channels of
communication were open and transparent in slack -- which is more than I can
say for AWS.

I'm now up to 5 small dev servers and running hundreds of thousands of tasks
per month across docker, serverless, and linux VMs.

+1 happy customer here.

------
gdamjan1
any other providers supporting ARM64 VPSs?

~~~
m01
There are some that do Raspberry Pi hosting, like [https://www.mythic-
beasts.com](https://www.mythic-beasts.com), but it's the older Pi3s for now
and they're not as cheap as e.g. Scaleway. It seems they've at least looked
into Pi4s: [https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2019/06/22/raspberry-
pi-o...](https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2019/06/22/raspberry-pi-on-
raspberry-pi/). Maybe there are other companies that host other SBCs.

------
nathell
How about the C1s? I've been happily paying $3/mo for a C1 instance to host my
personal stuff since 2015, and don't need to upgrade. Will they remain around?

~~~
eythian
> As a reminder, C2 and ARM64 instances include: C2S, C2M, C2L ARM64-2G,
> ARM64-4G, ARM64-8G, ARM64-16G, ARM64-32G, ARM64-64G, ARM64-128G

Looks like you're fine.

~~~
daneel_w
Perhaps. I'm a C1 user, and I received a notification about the EOL plan
because "one or more of your instances are affected by..."

------
quezzle
What’s the benefit of arm cloud instances to consumers?

None I can think of.

~~~
GordonS
Aside from price, you could argue they are better for the environment because
they use less power, which matters to a segment of consumers.

------
Infiltrator
I wonder if their ARMv7 instances will also EOL soon?

~~~
progval
Didn't they already discontinue these?

~~~
daneel_w
Yes. They are still running, but you can't allocate new ones. We can surmise
that it's just a matter of time before they, too, are shut down.

