
Scaleway: Bare metal SSD ARM servers - wut42
https://www.scaleway.com/
======
mrsirduke
It seems they're using xnbd to provide the storage for the box. On Debian, the
box is running a xnbd-client, which provides the rootfs:

    
    
      xnbd-client --blocksize 4096 --retry=900 10.1.32.197 4096 /dev/nbd0
    
      root@scw-6d2eff:~# df -h
      Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/nbd0        46G  507M   44G   2% /
    

I did not check, but I hope there's some filtering/authentication for that
process.

Like EC2 and others, the box has an internal ip allocated and an external ip
via nat (or something else).

I was able to download a file from OVH with ~500 Mbit/s throughput when
writing to the filesystem. Writing to /dev/null it increases to ~650 Mbit/s.

Running an untuned nginx, it can do ~300 req/s with ~20% cpu util.

Seeing as the storage is still virtual, I'm not really sure why this would be
so much better than a virtual machine. I like the idea though.

~~~
seunosewa
So their "no noisy neighbours" claim is essentially incorrect. (Poor IO due to
shared storage is the main performance issue with virtual servers.)

~~~
pquerna
When you use a remote blockstore like they are as your storage, you also
generally are always booting via PXE, and so far have a provider controlled
kernel.

I used to work on Rackspace OnMetal:
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal)

[https://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2014/07/02/putting-...](https://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2014/07/02/putting-
teeth-in-our-public-cloud/)

In OnMetal this not the case -- you get local storage, you have your local
kernel that you can re-install or do whatever you want to -- and if we have a
control plane outage, you can reboot -- there is no dependency once your
server is created on a provider hosted PXE server.

OnMetal isn't cheapo-ARM servers, but it is possible to build a "bare metal"
cloud, which is truly bare metal, like you would normally get, and no remote
block stores for your root FS.

~~~
mwcampbell
Do you think it would be feasible to provide a bare-metal cloud made of cheap
ARM or Atom servers while giving each server its own independent SSD?

~~~
pquerna
Yes, most definately.

OpenStack Ironic[1] can do this today, given you had right hardware. Making
that hardware "mutli-tenant" is not a trivial project, mostly because the
firmware stacks are still very closed, but it can be done. Top of Rack
switches are also another area of complexity/pain, but also feasible to
overcome with a little engineering.

[1]: OpenStack has its complexities, but the OnMetal project has upstreamed
everything feasible we can.

~~~
andrewsomething
These folks seemed to tried that approach, but gave up on Ironic for a number
of reasons:

[https://www.packet.net/blog/how-we-failed-at-
openstack](https://www.packet.net/blog/how-we-failed-at-openstack)

~~~
pquerna
True; I think it is reasonable project to take on if you are willing to staff
developers... if you are trying to build a "bare metal" public cloud, having
developers on staff is going to be a prerequisite for quite some time going
forward.

------
zx2c4
This is from the same company as Online.net --
[http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-
server](http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server) Hosted in France.

They're very reliable, and a pretty good competitor to KimSufi/SoYouStart/OVH.

Iliad, the group behind Online.net and Scaleway, also owns Free Mobile and
Free Telecom and Free Internet, all of which are quite popular.

~~~
aroch
Free/The Iliad Group is the Comcast/Verizon of the EU...They have horrible
peering and transit policies, which they maintain under the auspices of French
protectionist laws.

~~~
mikmak
but Online.net has its own network with a completely different policy ;)
(AS12876)

~~~
aroch
It may have its own ASN, but its still run just like the rest of Iliad's
networks. Online.net/Ponytelecom still lacks diversified transit that isn't
also run horribly hot and the NOC peering policies make it so that its all but
impossible to actually peer without exchanging money.

All the network properties operated under the Iliad umbrella suffer from this.
Iliad and Orange pushed a bill through parliament that basically says "French
ISPs can charge you whatever they want and you're required to pay it because
operating in France means mandatory connections to the entrenched regional
ISPs"

~~~
mikmak
well being the "noc", I pretty much know about it, so, point by point : \-
first our policy is here : [http://as12876.net/](http://as12876.net/), where
do you see "paid peering" ? \- diversified transit : we've got 4 tier 1
transit, is not that enough "diversified" ? I hardly see what we could do
better there ... \- peering: we are also available on the 2 main French IX !
you just need to drop a mail to get our routes on them (how much costs a mail
these days ?) we are also doing _free_ PNI with those having enough datas to
send/receive

we are also adding a new IX soon (order was sent yesterday) which will improve
our peering towards Europe

the infos you have are at least 10 years old imho... maybe look at
[http://map.online.net](http://map.online.net)

~~~
fweespeech
It looks like you are directly connected to OVH's network via Telehouse2 in
France from that map. :)

You may want to make that map more obvious/prevalent on Online.NET, I wasn't
aware you had a public network map like OVH does.

~~~
mikmak
agreed, there is a plan to improve that ;)

------
jjoe
"Scaleway is the first IaaS provider worldwide to offer an ARM based cloud"

Bold clame I see. We begun offering the exact same configuration early last
year ( [http://www.unixy.net/arm-server/](http://www.unixy.net/arm-server/) )

~~~
klapinat0r
Not sure it qualifies, but
[http://raspberrycolocation.com/](http://raspberrycolocation.com/) has been
around since 2013.

But, you know, salestext is useless :)

~~~
nknighthb
[http://raspberrycolocation.com/order/](http://raspberrycolocation.com/order/)

"Average delivery time" 90 days? I'm not even sure what that means, but it
doesn't strike me as particularly useful...

------
hbbio
This is a very interesting offer, that clearly targets DigitalOcean.

The only thing I could not find quickly is info about the company: Is it a
startup? Is it funded?

Until I found out it's a new product by Online, which is a subsidiary to one
of France biggest telecom disruptor. There should be an About us that tells
just that, which would clearly give more confidence to potential customers.

~~~
tusbar
There actually is an about section that tells just that:
[https://www.scaleway.com/faq](https://www.scaleway.com/faq).

------
cabirum
You need to verify email, then validate address, then add a credit card (no
paypal), and then press a button labeled "Enjoy my free month".

Except when you add a credit card, they try to bill you for 20EUR right away.

~~~
zumtar
Yes, but they clearly state - _" To register your payment information, we will
ask your bank for a 20,00€ debit preauthorization. This will appear on your
bank statement and be automatically released after 7 days."_.

This is a fairly common practice to weed out stolen credit-cards and to make
sure you are real subscriber/customer, no biggie.

~~~
cabirum
20 eur is quite uncommon, it's usually 1 or 2 usd/eur. So I skipped reading
these two lines of unassuming gray text and entered details of my disposable
visa with like 5 usd on it.

~~~
vikbez
dev here; made the text bold, and validation is now 2 euros :)

~~~
luisrudge
now you just need to enable paypal

------
gbl08ma
I tried their free trial when it was still branded as Online.net Labs. What
follows is my experience, which is good as anecdote only.

I use MariaDB-Galera in a project of mine to be able to run it in a parallel
fashion. To determine if the servers were suitable for my use, I tried to
install MariaDB-Galera, only to find out:

\- MariaDB doesn't officially support ARM yet;

\- The Debian and Ubuntu repos don't have the MariaDB-Galera edition
available;

\- All repos I could find with the Galera edition didn't have it compiled for
armhf, including the official repo, by virtue of the first point.

\- Compiling it on the server resulted in other problems: besides the usual
compile errors that can be more or less sorted out by hand, and the dependency
hell of the resulting deb packages (remember, no armhf packages available) I
figured it would be unacceptable (in terms of ease-of-maintenance) to have to
recompile MariaDB every time a new version with security fixes came out. This
is something I can live with when toying with Raspberry Pis and similar
things, but not on production stuff.

I eventually gave up, declaring the servers unsuitable for _my_ use. End of
anecdote.

IMHO they are charging too much for the product, at a time when the ARM
ecosystem is not yet ready for server use (the architecture and OS support are
fine, the user-land software, not so much). The servers are bare metal (it's
awesome being able to use as much CPU as you want without breaching AUPs or
hitting artificial caps), but the networked storage, while definitely better
than HDDs, may not fulfill the needs of those with higher I/O requirements (I
admit I haven't tested, also by virtue of Galera not being available). Lastly,
the prices first show without VAT, which means that if you're in the EU and
without a VAT ID, it'll turn out to be even more expensive. I'd consider
something like €7/month (perhaps with less storage) to be a more acceptable
price.

~~~
justincormack
They have local SSDs now, the previews had local HDs only. I do think the
pricing is a little higher than I expected. I had fewer problems with
compatibility than you. MariaDB seems to be in jessie [1]

[1]
[https://packages.debian.org/search?arch=armhf&keywords=maria...](https://packages.debian.org/search?arch=armhf&keywords=mariadb)

~~~
gbl08ma
That is the "normal" MariaDB, not the Galera edition. This is a problem that
has more to do with MariaDB than with Scaleway, but it still shows one of the
problems people may have with ARM servers at this point.

A couple of friends of mine are happier with compatibility than I am, too.
Others are even more disappointed than I am, since one of the uses they have
for dedicated stuff is game servers, which usually are closed source and not
available for ARM.

------
nly
Besides hacker curiosity, what's the appeal of ARM from _our_ perspective? I'm
not seeing a cost advantage here compared to Kimsufi (dedicated) or a good
SSD-backed VPS.

~~~
jfindley
Compared to a VPS there's some security benefits. You can't meaningfully
encrypt the disk of a VPS - as the decryption key can easily be read out of
memory by the host. A physical server offers slightly more protection than
this - although if there's no TPM not all _that_ much.

VMs are also bad at some specific tasks - they have issues with clock accuracy
for example.

One appeal of ARM, specifically, would be that it's cheap. Sadly these are
based on ARMv7, which is a lot more limited than aarch64/ARMv8 and Intel CPUs.
- but hopefully they or someone else will have an ARMv8 offering out soon.

~~~
timthorn
They already are: [http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-
openstack-p...](http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-openstack-
public-cloud-on-64-bit-arm-servers/)

------
mrsirduke
It'd be nice to see FreeBSD adopt arm as a Tier 1 architecture with the
increased adoption in the datacenter.

~~~
pyvpx
it'd be nice if NetBSD was available from these cloud providers.

~~~
justincormack
There is a thread in their support forum, it seems like they want nbd rootfs.
It is a pretty simple (not very good) protocol (from memory) but I dont think
there is a BSD driver at present.

------
kardos
How well would one of these work for running TOR? The unmetered 200 mbps would
lend itself to a decent relay, but only if the ARM chips can process the
traffic at that rate.

------
pvnick
I like the basic, easy design. One suggestion though (take this with a grain
of salt though, since I am a backend programmer and not a design specialist).
I didn't see the 20 euro preauthorization message the first time the new card
dialog came up, and instead I closed it and went to the billing faq to find
out what that was about when I saw Visa asking me to approve a 20 euro charge.
I saw the message the second time around, but perhaps making that message a
little more prominent would be helpful, especially for simpletons like me to
tend to miss things.

~~~
vikbez
Dev here. just changed this, also it's now 2 euro for the validation :)

~~~
pvnick
Now that's good customer service. The new message style is much more prominent
and obvious. I wish you guys the best of luck!

------
e40
As a developer, where can I get a 1U ARM server? I thought they'd be much more
available by now. Scaleway say they designed their own servers, which is
interesting. Aren't there any on the market that are good enough? I guess not.

~~~
lsc
you can get an AMD A1100 dev kit, but it's like three grand.

I mean, obviously, that isn't a realistic price, but if you want an ARM server
with ECC ram right now, that's one way to go. (my understanding is that once
AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point, it will
be on the order of a few hundred bucks.)

Most people actually doing things with ARM servers are using non-ecc ram,
which I don't think is particularly practical for real world use. The problem
with non-ecc is not that it fails more often; the problem with non-ecc is that
you often don't know when it failed.

~~~
e40
_once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point_

Why is that? What changed?

~~~
lsc
because this has been right around the corner for longer than I would expect.
The big problem here is that AMD is fighting against a moving target. If they
don't move and get the thing out the door soon, Intel will be out with a new
chip, which will raise the bar further. Like a year and a half ago, when I was
trying to get myself a dev kit, it looked like a really nice piece of kit that
would provide a real advantage (above and beyond the novelty) over competing
x86 offerings from intel, but that was before the v3 intel chips.

I mean, from a shallow evaluation, I _think_ that if these things came out at
the "couple hundred dollar" price point, they would be competitive right now.
at $300 per for board+cpu, I'd buy 20 right now. But I'm not at all sure that
will be true a year from now.

(Note, I'm entirely ecc, so we're not talking about atoms. There is a huge
opportunity here because intel stunts it's e3 line to 32gib ram. AMD needs to
get in and exploit this while the getting is good. Yes, the 4xxx CPUs don't
have any such limit, but compared to the E3, they are pathetic. These ARM
boards would give AMD a chance to offer a reasonable compute per watt in a
package with a ram footprint that can crush the E3.)

But... it's a year and a half later, and I still see no sign of AMD actually
selling the things, other than as engineering samples at engineering sample
prices, and meanwhile, intel is improving their x86 lineup.

Maybe I'm just impatient, but I just don't have a lot of hope that by the time
it is out it will be able to compete with virtualizing a big xeon box.

I mean, yes, there are some applications where you really want your own
server, and the A1100, if it does ship before Intel releases the ram limits on
the E3, could compete in that niche, but for ARM to really take off in the
datacenter, it needs to be cheaper per unit work done than a big xeon box.
E.g. I need to be able to replace one of my giant dual xeons with four or five
of these puppies, and it needs to cost less over the life of the hardware.

I'm paying California prices for power, so it shouldn't be that hard, but I'm
just really frustrated by the slow progress of the AMD ARM server (and ARM
boards that support ECC in general.)

~~~
e40
Yeah, I had some of the same concerns. Thanks for the details response.

------
jstsch
I used their beta, and was pleasantly surprised by the performance of these
little boxes. I find the idea of a dedicated box vs. virtualisation quite
attractive for some hard to quantify reasons.

Wondering if they'll roll-out in more regions soon. Interesting to see the
international take-up, of course quite an euro-centric approach :)

------
Bud
Site looks good, but they do need better editors. There's a glaring typo
before you even get past the first page:

"Deploy dedicated SSD servers with constant and predictable performances (sic)
in 44 seconds."

More typos as you scroll down.

~~~
edouardb
Help welcome :)

------
masokupride
I have used online.net labs bare metal arm cloud servers and scaleway seems to
offer the exact same. Can anyone explain the difference or is this just a re-
releasing?

fwiw, i am from the east coast us, and have used both online.net labs and ovh
dedicated cloud from ks and sys, and I have found that online.net has a lower
latency and higher throughput to me.

also fwiw, i have not had issues with finding arm packages for developing in
node, golang, or mono

~~~
Syrup-tan
Online Labs[0] turned into Scaleway.

There's a blog post about it at [1]

\--

[0] [http://labs.online.net/](http://labs.online.net/) [1]
[https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-
sca...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-scaleway/)

------
thresh
The CPU performance is a joke though.

c1 from instantcloud.io:

    
    
      ubuntu@c1-10-1-33-39:~$ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 11119 512 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 111478 512 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 1950 1024 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 34638 1024 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 291 2048 bit private RSA's in 10.01s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 9393 2048 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 40 4096 bit private RSA's in 10.16s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 2402 4096 bit public RSA's in 10.01s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
      built on: Thu Oct 16 16:07:24 UTC 2014
      options:bn(64,32) rc4(ptr,char) des(idx,cisc,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(ptr)
      compiler: cc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DAES_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000899s 0.000090s   1111.9  11147.8
      rsa 1024 bits 0.005128s 0.000289s    195.0   3463.8
      rsa 2048 bits 0.034399s 0.001065s     29.1    939.3
      rsa 4096 bits 0.254000s 0.004167s      3.9    240.0
    

local odroid u3:

    
    
      thresh@odroid:~$ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 19334 512 bit private RSA's in 9.99s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 204957 512 bit public RSA's in 9.97s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 3490 1024 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 62453 1024 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 516 2048 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 17051 2048 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 72 4096 bit private RSA's in 10.09s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 4434 4096 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
      built on: Fri Jun 20 19:00:28 UTC 2014
      options:bn(64,32) rc4(ptr,char) des(idx,cisc,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(ptr)
      compiler: cc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DAES_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000517s 0.000049s   1935.3  20557.4
      rsa 1024 bits 0.002865s 0.000160s    349.0   6245.3
      rsa 2048 bits 0.019380s 0.000586s     51.6   1705.1
      rsa 4096 bits 0.140139s 0.002255s      7.1    443.4
    

digitalocean cheapest vps:

    
    
      thresh@thre ~ $ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 119305 512 bit private RSA's in 9.81s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 1450435 512 bit public RSA's in 9.85s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 35347 1024 bit private RSA's in 9.85s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 541458 1024 bit public RSA's in 9.86s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 5259 2048 bit private RSA's in 9.84s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 161094 2048 bit public RSA's in 9.88s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 627 4096 bit private RSA's in 9.81s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 41353 4096 bit public RSA's in 9.75s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013
      built on: Thu Mar 19 18:31:36 UTC 2015
      options:bn(64,64) rc4(16x,int) des(idx,cisc,16,int) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
      compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -m64 -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DMD32_REG_T=int -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT5 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DAES_ASM -DVPAES_ASM -DBSAES_ASM -DWHIRLPOOL_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000082s 0.000007s  12161.6 147252.3
      rsa 1024 bits 0.000279s 0.000018s   3588.5  54914.6
      rsa 2048 bits 0.001871s 0.000061s    534.5  16305.1
      rsa 4096 bits 0.015646s 0.000236s     63.9   4241.3
    

amazon t1.micro:

    
    
      [ec2-user@ip-10-71-147-165 ~]$ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 85447 512 bit private RSA's in 9.48s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 123882 512 bit public RSA's in 9.96s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 7720 1024 bit private RSA's in 9.98s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 187876 1024 bit public RSA's in 10.04s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 1268 2048 bit private RSA's in 9.99s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 67337 2048 bit public RSA's in 10.07s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 36 4096 bit private RSA's in 7.89s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 25180 4096 bit public RSA's in 9.85s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1g-fips 7 Apr 2014
      built on: Wed Apr  9 21:51:31 UTC 2014
      options:bn(64,64) md2(int) rc4(16x,int) des(idx,cisc,16,int) aes(partial) idea(int) blowfish(idx)
      compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DKRB5_MIT -m64 -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -Wall -O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic -Wa,--noexecstack -DPURIFY -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT5 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DAES_ASM -DVPAES_ASM -DBSAES_ASM -DWHIRLPOOL_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000111s 0.000080s   9013.4  12438.0
      rsa 1024 bits 0.001293s 0.000053s    773.5  18712.7
      rsa 2048 bits 0.007879s 0.000150s    126.9   6686.9
      rsa 4096 bits 0.219167s 0.000391s      4.6   2556.3

~~~
auganov
Tried running your benchmark, seems noisy.

t1.micro running ubuntu

    
    
      sign                                 verify         sign/s       verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000104s 0.000015s   9647.3  67715.6
      rsa 1024 bits 0.003637s 0.000236s    275.0   4242.7
      rsa 2048 bits 0.004487s 0.000107s    222.8   9351.2
      rsa 4096 bits 0.180566s 0.003013s      5.5    331.9
    

t1.micro running CoreOS

    
    
      sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000109s 0.000009s   9190.4 114333.6
      rsa 1024 bits 0.000354s 0.000023s   2822.7  42725.7
      rsa 2048 bits 0.002491s 0.000078s    401.5  12833.4
      rsa 4096 bits 0.017951s 0.000289s     55.7   3454.7
    

t2.micro running ubuntu

    
    
                      sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000060s 0.000005s  16569.7 208219.9
      rsa 1024 bits 0.000196s 0.000013s   5113.5  74559.9
      rsa 2048 bits 0.001459s 0.000045s    685.3  22400.0
      rsa 4096 bits 0.010396s 0.000165s     96.2   6050.9

~~~
brendangregg
It may be noisy, but so are micro's. If you had that much variation between
ubuntu and CoreOS on large+, that would be interesting. (Other than the micro
differences, variation like this could be 32- vs 64-bit, or different default
daemons running, eating CPU).

------
oskarpearson
I just had very fast turnaround on a support ticket from them. Simple issue,
but still - I'm really impressed.

Support ticket answered in < 2 minutes. Resolved in 9 minutes.

(The ticket was sort of my fault, partly a design issue on their UI where I
couldn't resubmit info. There are teething problems, but they sorted it out
really quickly.)

------
afandian
Any idea how a JVM would do on one of these?

~~~
fulafel
I don't know if there are any commercial special purpouse ARM JVMs, but
HotSpot/OpenJDK is pretty sad performance-wise on ARM.

~~~
nacnud
Oracle provide Java 8 for ARM:
[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-arm-
downloads-2187472.html) The performance on my little Raspberry Pi went up
dramatically compared to OpenJDK when they released it (over a year ago).

~~~
fulafel
There's a marked absence of benchmark data on the web about this vs same on
x86. Does Oracle's license forbid publication of such?

------
sushimako
The title is misleading, as €0.02/hr would result in €14.4/month. Their
pricing page[0] lists the servers at €9.90/month.

Their "Infinite Storage" is €0.02/ _month_ , though.

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

~~~
ValentineC
> Their "Infinite Storage" is €0.02/month, though.

"Infinite Storage" is, like the term "unlimited", misleading. I clicked
through only to find out that it's for 1GB of storage, with unlimited requests
and transfers.

~~~
MetaCosm
I think the implication was an infinite amount of those 1Gb chunks -- IE: they
can grow the infrastructure as fast are you can use it.

It is almost assuredly a lie (as someone who is working on a project scaling
to PBs -- I pressed a lot of vendors on "unlimited" or "infinite" and most
said they simply couldn't scale to X).

------
m4tthumphrey
Typo on servers button:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/xspd7l0ld56dm2e/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xspd7l0ld56dm2e/Screenshot%202015-04-02%2014.38.11.png?dl=0)

------
3princip
This looks great! It's interesting to see hardware innovation, self-
provisioning "bare metal" and so on.

Just one problem, I'm getting an internal server error while verifying my
address (home address), and the SMS isn't arriving. I'll try it a little
later. But I am a little confused, how exactly do you verify a home address?

~~~
kdeldycke
Dev here. Sorry for the address issue. It was all my fault: validation was too
strict. The fix was pushed on production servers 16 hours ago. You should try
again ! :)

------
alecco
What's the L2 cache size? They don't mention it anywhere, just plain
benchmarks unrelated to memory speed.

~~~
vikbez
CPU is MV78460; 2MB L2 cache

doc: [https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-
xp...](https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-
xp/assets/Marvell-ArmadaXP-SoC-product%20brief.pdf)

~~~
alecco
Cool, thanks for the link!

Do you know the latency numbers?

Edit: found this [https://www.ruhr-uni-
bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/file...](https://www.ruhr-uni-
bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/files/System_Level_Benchmarking_Analysis_of_the_Cortex_A9_MPCore.pdf)
(slide 17)

------
BillinghamJ
This seems pretty expensive to me. How powerful are the instances?

~~~
rihegher
"The C1 server is a 4-cores ARMv7 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 1 Gbit/s network
card. It is designed for the cloud and horizontal scaling."

"How does a C1 server perform? A C1 server gives a constant CPUMark of 12K.
This is equivalent to an AWS M3 medium instance. "

~~~
rkrzr
I find this surprising in both directions: Either that an AWS M3 medium
instance is so slow or that ARM servers got so fast!

Edit: It seems that ARM CPUs got really fast: According to [1] an Intel Core
i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz gets a Passmark score of 12k.

[1]:
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)

~~~
Ardren
I am 99% sure that's not the same benchmark. The cheapest way to break 12,000
CPUMarks is a $370 Intel Core i7-5820K (15MB of cache, 6 cores, 12 threads).

Perhaps they are using the Android benchmark. A score of 12,000 is about what
a quad core ARMv7 phone gets.

[http://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html](http://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html)

Edit:

Compared with the cross-platform Geekbench3 a HTC One (ARMv7 4 core,
1.7-2.2Ghz, 12,000 Android CPUMarks) gets between 2,000 and 3,000 points[1],
while a 5820K gets around 20,000 points[2].

[1]:
[http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=HTC+One](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=HTC+One)

[2]:
[http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=Intel+Cor...](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=Intel+Core+i7-5820K)

~~~
rkrzr
Ah that would explain it. That's a pretty misleading claim then. So I guess
ARMs are still pretty slow and Amazon is not all that terrible after all
performance-wise. That also makes more sense intuition-wise.

------
lqdc13
This is like paying $10 every month for a raspberry pi + $40 SSD, or $75 in
hardware.

I rather pay $40/mo for Hetzner 3930 CPU server with something like 30 VMs.

~~~
onion2k
"I'd rather pay four times more for something better" isn't the most
compelling argument against Scaleway. They're targeting people who want to
host something for $10/month. For the money what they're offering is pretty
good.

~~~
nske
They are targeting people that want to deploy large quantities of such micro-
servers, programmatically on demand.

Otherwise, someone willing to pay as little as possible for just a single bare
metal dedicated machine, is much better of renting a Kimsufi instead.

[http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/](http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/)

------
tomjen3
Why would I use this over Amazon? It seems their cost is higher and it is ARM,
which I assume sucks from a perspective of running e.g Python.

~~~
bigiain
Python runs just fine on an ARM powered RaspberryPi (and some custom IMX233
ARM hardware I was working on a couple of years back with ARM ARCH Linux on
it). I suspect not everything that gcc compiles on x86 will work, but you
might be surprised at how much "just works", or has versions available where
someone's already done the hard work of ensuring it compiles properly for ARM.

~~~
tomjen3
I don't mean it works as in it runs. I mean that the Python Jit would be
optimized for X86. It has to run better to be worth the trouble of using this.

~~~
icebraining
What Python jit? Do you mean PyPy?

~~~
tomjen3
I assumed the standard python command used a JIT.

Is this really not the case? In 2015?

~~~
icebraining
Nope, CPython compiles source to bytecode (ahead of time), but then interprets
that bytecode. There's no JIT.

~~~
wyldfire
...except for the aforementioned PyPy. Which is quite good IMO! (and supports
ARM)

------
teamhappy
Anybody know if they (unofficially) support FreeBSD?

~~~
gherkin
Support is on the way it seems:

[https://hub.scaleway.com/](https://hub.scaleway.com/)

------
chinathrow
No imprint, no address, no phone numbers. A french company.

"Online SAS, a company registered in France."

No imprint in France? Illegal.

~~~
Rexxar
[https://www.scaleway.com/terms](https://www.scaleway.com/terms) (at the end
of the page)

    
    
        ONLINE, a simplified stock corporation (Société anonyme par actions simplifiée) with a working capital
        of €214.410,50, headquartered at 8 rue de la ville l'Evêque - 75008 Paris, FRANCE, registered with the
        Paris Corporate and Trade Register number RCS PARIS B 433 115 904, VAT number FR35433115904, reachable
        via its Internet site http//www.scaleway.com/ as well as by telephone at +33 (0) 184 130 000", or by 
        fax at +33 (0) 899 193 775 (€1.35 per call plus €0.34/min.)

~~~
chinathrow
Thanks - that wasn't there at launch time. Great they got it fixed.

------
hoodoof
Praise the lord. Why aren't more cloud companies selling bare metal ARM
servers?

~~~
SwellJoe
I just went searching for ARM servers last week...the options for white box
systems are very slim. There are no Supermicro, Asus, etc. ARM rack mount
systems yet, so you'd need to work out a deal with one of the few big name
vendors with offerings in this space.

The costs seemed very high, to me, compared to whitebox/barebones AMD or even
Intel based servers on a performance basis.

I think it is simply a function of them not being widely available cheaply
yet. I wonder how they're getting them cheap enough to make this make
sense...maybe quantity pricing is much better.

~~~
forgottenacc56
HP are manufacturing racks of high density arm servers. I would have thought
someone would be renting them out.

~~~
SwellJoe
That's one of the big names I had in mind. They're pretty expensive for the
performance you get. I'd choose a multi-core AMD or Intel...even when
virtualized it's gonna provide more juice for your dollar, according to the
math I did. Which is weird because ARM has come so far. I'm really wanting to
try ARM on the server but the costs are still wrong. This is, of course, at
least partly just because the barebones and white box manufacturers haven't
entered the fray.

Memory capacity was actually my biggest cost factor that made a difference.
You can buy x86 boxes with 256GB capacity for quite cheap. Up to 1TB for not
outrageous amounts. The micro servers are designed for quite low amounts of
memory... But memory is, by far, the bottleneck I am concerned with. CPU speed
barely matters at all...so virtualizing CPU is fine as long as memory can be
huge and fast.

------
randunel
You can get 24hrs free by validating your phone number :)

~~~
icebraining
Doesn't seem to be working, at least for Portuguese numbers. Tried resending
it twice, but I'm still to receive anything.

~~~
milankragujevic
It doesn't work for Serbian numbers either. I tried to verify my number for
the free preview and it didn't work. Their mobile gateway is down probably.

~~~
niluje
Our SMS provider has issues to send messages to foreign numbers :( If you
write us a ticket, we'll validate your phone manually

------
kentt
I assume the data center is in France. Is that correct?

~~~
mikmak
yes, first scaleway's platforms are in Paris suburbs in our own datacenters
(see [http://iliad-datacenter.fr](http://iliad-datacenter.fr)), more platforms
are expected (most likely outside of France)

------
davedx
Feedback: Clear information; some typos in the FAQ.

~~~
edouardb
Where? :)

~~~
afandian
I was looking at the wrong FAQ. There are some typos on
[https://www.scaleway.com/faq](https://www.scaleway.com/faq) :

> Scaleway is also providing a fast, 100% S3-compatible, object storage
> service called SIS (Scaleway Infinit Storage). SIS starts at €0.00004 for
> 1GB of storage.

Should be 'infinite'?

> At Scaleway, we provide bare metal SSD servers. When you request a server,
> you get full root access on a dedicated servers.

Plural agreement. Should be 'on a dedicated server'.

> A simple, robust REST APIs to control all your cloud ressources

Plural agreement, 'Simple, robust REST APIs'. Also spelling, 'resources'.

~~~
edouardb
Fixed! thanks

------
late2part
Vive La France!

------
elcct
I thought it is 0.02 EUR per month. That would be interesting... otherwise it
seems to be too expensive.

------
dotemacs
This story is posted twice, on the front page of HN.

They have only one OS available, Linux, (in various flavours), while the
others are branded 'coming soon'. That alone doesn't inspire any confidence.

~~~
SwellJoe
What other OS could you want, _especially_ on ARM? Most alternatives to Linux
are a mistake for web hosting at this point in history. As much as I like some
of the ideas and features of some of the alternatives, when taken as a whole,
Linux is simply the right tool for the job most of the time.

In short, while its cool if they offer other OS options, my confidence
certainly is not shaken by them choosing to roll out first with just Linux
support. It seems like the only sensible thing, to me, given how good Linux
ARM support is.

~~~
yellowapple
> What other OS could you want, especially on ARM?

OpenBSD. Or any of the BSDs, but OpenBSD would be ideal.

That said, my confidence isn't exactly shaken either by the current lack of
BSD availability (FreeBSD is supposedly "coming soon"). I'm getting by
moderately well on Linux right now for my own "cloud" needs. It would just be
nice to have my preference in operating systme (and ecosystem; I've taken a
liking to OpenBSD's subprojects like relayd/httpd, OpenSMTPd, etc., and it's
much easier to use these things on OpenBSD - or probably even on FreeBSD -
than it is on GNU/Linux).

~~~
dotemacs
Exactly this: NetBSD & OpenBSD. Linux, although popular, is not the only
operating system.

~~~
yellowapple
Even FreeBSD would be better for my use cases. At least it supports pf.

