7 ms·

Scaleway C2 and ARM64 instances will reach end-of-life in December 2020

70 points by alexellisuk 7y ago

bhouston 7y ago
C2 introduced in April 2017 it appears: https://blog.scaleway.com/2017/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-cloud-servers/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2017/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-clo... The C1 was introduced in 2013. And now Scaleway's Arm experiment is over?
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Wasn't Scaleway originally Online's ARM experiment anyways? Now Online is just called Scaleway and has no ARM instances.
gdamjan1 7y ago
any other providers supporting ARM64 VPSs?
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  AWS
- mkj 7y ago
  packet.com if you want to count dedicated servers too
- alexellisuk 7y ago
  Funny you should ask - bare-metal is probably one of the better options - https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal
- m01 7y ago
  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-on-raspberry-pi/ https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2019/06/22/raspberry-pi-o.... Maybe there are other companies that host other SBCs.
Infiltrator 7y ago
I wonder if their ARMv7 instances will also EOL soon?
- progval 7y ago
  Didn't they already discontinue these?
  - daneel_w 7y ago
    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.
ksec 7y ago
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-cpu-with-768-threads-in-2020/ https://www.servethehome.com/marvell-thunderx3-arm-server-cp...
- progval 7y ago
  From the email they sent all consumer: > 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
- iagovar 7y ago
  ARM servers aren't much cheaper and you deal with extra stuff. I'm sure they have their use cases, but as a typical VPS user I don't see the point.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    I’ve always seen the primary utility of ARM being in devices attached to a battery. In a data center the costs of changing probably trounce whatever power savings may be available.
    - progval 7y ago
      Note that power savings in a DC are double: the device itself uses less; but you also save power in the AC. Using non-x86 (or even just non-Intel) is also an investment, as you are less dependent on a duopoly.
      - ashtonkem 7y ago
fs111 7y ago
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.
- WildGreenLeave 7y ago
  I've been running a TOR node on their ARM server for over a year and it has been stable from the beginning. On average I'm pushing 22.89TiB a month[0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/rXWYvYa.png https://i.imgur.com/rXWYvYa.png
  - djmobley 7y ago
    That’s an awful lot of data transfer for a low cost instance. I think most providers would find a way to pull the plug on that kind of usage.
    - WildGreenLeave 7y ago
      I agree! If at any point they would've asked me to lower my usage I would've gladly done so. But they never did that so kudos to them. :) Especially considering it costs me 3EU a month.
    - daneel_w 7y ago
      It's one of their many strong selling points - unmetered traffic, even on their lowest-tier offers.
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      Online/Scaleway is a subsidiary of Iliad, a French telecom operator. Rumor has it (and it's not far-fetched) that they actively encourage heavy upload usage from Scaleway customers to help balance out their peering and/or transit connections to negotiate better deals.
    - RL_Quine 7y ago
      Why? It doesn't impact them meaningfully. The instances only have a 200Mbit interface so it's not like you can saturate their pipes.
quezzle 7y ago
What’s the benefit of arm cloud instances to consumers? None I can think of.
- pas 7y ago
  In theory, price.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  I wanted an monitoring host, which would just run HTTP/SSH/PING/FTP tests against my real infrastructure. So I googled providers with decent reviews that were cheap. I ended up with an ARM instance, which was just fine for me. Since my monitoring application[1] was golang based it was a quick cross-compile to get a binary I could deploy to the host. The host itself ran Debian , and all the packages I'd expect were easily available. TLDR: Cheap and easy to deploy to. 1 - https://github.com/skx/overseer/ https://github.com/skx/overseer/
- rwmj 7y ago
  I guess this is what Nuvia is trying to change. They are reputed to be bringing the power-saving features of ARM to ARM servers. (https://nuviainc.com/ https://nuviainc.com/)
- ksec 7y ago
  Price, assuming they can get the ARM CPU for cheap, and it uses much less energy than alternative.
- GordonS 7y ago
  Aside from price, you could argue they are better for the environment because they use less power, which matters to a segment of consumers.
progval 7y ago
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.
londons_explore 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    How many people with generic non-ARM specific code would bother running it on an ARM instance?
    - bzusb 7y ago
      I have arm instances for the sole reason that they are cheaper than x86 instances.
    - zdkl 7y ago
      Well, they were pretty cheap so if you could live slower execution python/java worked fine as an example
    - floatboth 7y ago
      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"
  - 7y ago
nathell 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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..."
- usr1106 7y ago
  > How about the C1s? I've been happily paying $3/mo for a C1 instance to host my personal stuff since Same here. My impression is that C1 is so dead that nobody in the company remembered to announce discontinuation :( Seriously, check the kernel maintenance if you don't understand what I mean.
- Scaleway 7y ago
  Hello, no end of life is planned for the moment for C1 Instances. Nevertheless, these instances are now almost six years old. We recommend to rather turn to the Development and General Purpose Instances to build a future-proof infrastructure. Regards -AA
d99kris 7y ago
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.
gnfargbl 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
celicaraptor 7y ago
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.
- AC_Fan 7y ago
  Hetzner is doing network maintenance right now, check again in a while. This is the first time in quite a while that maintenance has degraded the network performance.
- angristan 7y ago
  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
pbuBMRh3 7y ago
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-servers/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/c2-insanely-affordable-x64-se... [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
jedisct1 7y ago
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.

70 points by alexellisuk 7y ago

C2 introduced in April 2017 it appears: https://blog.scaleway.com/2017/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-cloud-servers/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2017/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-clo... The C1 was introduced in 2013. And now Scaleway's Arm experiment is over?

Hamuko 7y ago
Wasn't Scaleway originally Online's ARM experiment anyways? Now Online is just called Scaleway and has no ARM instances.

gdamjan1 7y ago

any other providers supporting ARM64 VPSs?

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
AWS
mkj 7y ago
packet.com if you want to count dedicated servers too
alexellisuk 7y ago
Funny you should ask - bare-metal is probably one of the better options - https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal
m01 7y ago
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-on-raspberry-pi/ https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2019/06/22/raspberry-pi-o.... Maybe there are other companies that host other SBCs.

Infiltrator 7y ago

I wonder if their ARMv7 instances will also EOL soon?

progval 7y ago
Didn't they already discontinue these?
- daneel_w 7y ago
  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.

ksec 7y ago

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-cpu-with-768-threads-in-2020/ https://www.servethehome.com/marvell-thunderx3-arm-server-cp...

progval 7y ago
From the email they sent all consumer: > 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
iagovar 7y ago
ARM servers aren't much cheaper and you deal with extra stuff. I'm sure they have their use cases, but as a typical VPS user I don't see the point.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  I’ve always seen the primary utility of ARM being in devices attached to a battery. In a data center the costs of changing probably trounce whatever power savings may be available.
  - progval 7y ago
    Note that power savings in a DC are double: the device itself uses less; but you also save power in the AC. Using non-x86 (or even just non-Intel) is also an investment, as you are less dependent on a duopoly.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago

fs111 7y ago

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.

WildGreenLeave 7y ago
I've been running a TOR node on their ARM server for over a year and it has been stable from the beginning. On average I'm pushing 22.89TiB a month[0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/rXWYvYa.png https://i.imgur.com/rXWYvYa.png
- djmobley 7y ago
  That’s an awful lot of data transfer for a low cost instance. I think most providers would find a way to pull the plug on that kind of usage.
  - WildGreenLeave 7y ago
    I agree! If at any point they would've asked me to lower my usage I would've gladly done so. But they never did that so kudos to them. :) Especially considering it costs me 3EU a month.
  - daneel_w 7y ago
    It's one of their many strong selling points - unmetered traffic, even on their lowest-tier offers.
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    Online/Scaleway is a subsidiary of Iliad, a French telecom operator. Rumor has it (and it's not far-fetched) that they actively encourage heavy upload usage from Scaleway customers to help balance out their peering and/or transit connections to negotiate better deals.
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    Why? It doesn't impact them meaningfully. The instances only have a 200Mbit interface so it's not like you can saturate their pipes.

quezzle 7y ago

What’s the benefit of arm cloud instances to consumers? None I can think of.

pas 7y ago
In theory, price.
stevekemp 7y ago
I wanted an monitoring host, which would just run HTTP/SSH/PING/FTP tests against my real infrastructure. So I googled providers with decent reviews that were cheap. I ended up with an ARM instance, which was just fine for me. Since my monitoring application[1] was golang based it was a quick cross-compile to get a binary I could deploy to the host. The host itself ran Debian , and all the packages I'd expect were easily available. TLDR: Cheap and easy to deploy to. 1 - https://github.com/skx/overseer/ https://github.com/skx/overseer/
rwmj 7y ago
I guess this is what Nuvia is trying to change. They are reputed to be bringing the power-saving features of ARM to ARM servers. (https://nuviainc.com/ https://nuviainc.com/)
ksec 7y ago
Price, assuming they can get the ARM CPU for cheap, and it uses much less energy than alternative.
GordonS 7y ago
Aside from price, you could argue they are better for the environment because they use less power, which matters to a segment of consumers.

progval 7y ago

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.

londons_explore 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  How many people with generic non-ARM specific code would bother running it on an ARM instance?
  - bzusb 7y ago
    I have arm instances for the sole reason that they are cheaper than x86 instances.
  - zdkl 7y ago
    Well, they were pretty cheap so if you could live slower execution python/java worked fine as an example
  - floatboth 7y ago
    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"
- 7y ago

nathell 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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..."
usr1106 7y ago
> How about the C1s? I've been happily paying $3/mo for a C1 instance to host my personal stuff since Same here. My impression is that C1 is so dead that nobody in the company remembered to announce discontinuation :( Seriously, check the kernel maintenance if you don't understand what I mean.
Scaleway 7y ago
Hello, no end of life is planned for the moment for C1 Instances. Nevertheless, these instances are now almost six years old. We recommend to rather turn to the Development and General Purpose Instances to build a future-proof infrastructure. Regards -AA

d99kris 7y ago

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.

gnfargbl 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

celicaraptor 7y ago

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.

AC_Fan 7y ago
Hetzner is doing network maintenance right now, check again in a while. This is the first time in quite a while that maintenance has degraded the network performance.
angristan 7y ago
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

pbuBMRh3 7y ago

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

jedisct1 7y ago

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.