27 ms·

Scaleway: Bare metal SSD ARM servers

326 points by wut42 12y ago

BillinghamJ 12y ago
This seems pretty expensive to me. How powerful are the instances?
- rihegher 12y ago
  "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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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+Core+i7-5820K http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=Intel+Cor...
      - yasth 12y ago
        Just to give another data point closer to price an Atom N2800 (which kimsufi offers with ssd for the same monthly price) gets around 1100, so competitive but not world changingly so. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?dir=desc&q=atom+n2800 http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?dir=desc&q=...
      - rkrzr 12y ago
        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.
  - ecliptik 12y ago
    To bad they're older 32-bit ARMv7 cpus. Ant serious ARM computing needs to use aarch64 for any type of serious scaling and performance. Glad to see they support Docker on them, that's one of the killer apps for ARM systems.
sushimako 12y ago
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
- rihegher 12y ago
  "How do I take advantage of the monthly billing? Each resource is billed per hour up to its monthly cap. The monthly cost of a resource is calculated by running the hourly rate for 500 hours. If a resource is used during more than 500 continuous hours in the month, the rest of the month is free."
  - sushimako 12y ago
    Thanks, i missed the hourly/monthly switch.
- ValentineC 12y ago
  > 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 12y ago
    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).
  - MetaCosm 12y ago
    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).
randunel 12y ago
You can get 24hrs free by validating your phone number :)
- icebraining 12y ago
  Doesn't seem to be working, at least for Portuguese numbers. Tried resending it twice, but I'm still to receive anything.
  - milankragujevic 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      Our SMS provider has issues to send messages to foreign numbers :( If you write us a ticket, we'll validate your phone manually
- jbub 12y ago
  Yep also not working for Slovak number.
- edouardb 12y ago
  Or a free 15 mn trial at http://instantcloud.io http://instantcloud.io
hoodoof 12y ago
Praise the lord. Why aren't more cloud companies selling bare metal ARM servers?
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    HP are manufacturing racks of high density arm servers. I would have thought someone would be renting them out.
    - SwellJoe 12y ago
      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.
- hhw 12y ago
  Because Intel destroys anything ARM has to offer in terms of price/performance or performance/watt, even on microservers since the Avotons came out. We're also going to see Xeon D's and Denvertons before proper ARM based server solutions come to market.
hbbio 12y ago
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 12y ago
  There actually is an about section that tells just that: https://www.scaleway.com/faq https://www.scaleway.com/faq.
davedx 12y ago
Feedback: Clear information; some typos in the FAQ.
- edouardb 12y ago
  Where? :)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - afandian 12y ago
    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'.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - afandian 12y ago
        I thought so, hence the question mark. The whole phrase 'Scaleway Infinit Storage' could be French, although perhaps it would be 'Storage Infinit Scaleway'.
    - edouardb 12y ago
      Fixed! thanks
jstsch 12y ago
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 :)
dotemacs 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    > 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 12y ago
      Exactly this: NetBSD & OpenBSD. Linux, although popular, is not the only operating system.
      - yellowapple 12y ago
        Even FreeBSD would be better for my use cases. At least it supports pf.
lqdc13 12y ago
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 12y ago
  "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 12y ago
    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/
- nknighthb 12y ago
  > This is like paying $10 every month for a raspberry pi + $40 SSD, or $75 in hardware. Raspberry Pis and SSDs do not come with bandwidth and redundant network, power, and cooling infrastructure.
- niluje 12y ago
  except the raspberry isn't in a datacenter, it won't probably have the same network speed, you can't move an IP from a raspberry to another one, you can't easily make snapshots, ...
- hackerboos 12y ago
  >I rather pay $40/mo for Hetzner 3930 CPU server with something like 30 VMs. Good luck when Hetzner null route your server when a competitor DDoSes you
  - sfilipov 12y ago
zx2c4 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    but Online.net has its own network with a completely different policy ;) (AS12876)
    - Loic 12y ago
      Not really. Try to do a transfer of a single big backup file from a server with online.net and a server in Denmark. 6kB/s, yes, 6kB/s. Doing the same from a server with Gandi (VM), OVH (dedicated), was basically 100Mbps (it was what I had that time). To serve the French market only, Online.net is really good, but you do not have a consistent high quality network in Europe (I did not try outside EU).
    - aroch 12y ago
      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"
chinathrow 12y ago
No imprint, no address, no phone numbers. A french company. "Online SAS, a company registered in France." No imprint in France? Illegal.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Tried scrolling down on the Online.net's website? On the footer of their home page, they have their phone number, address and RCS number.
  - chinathrow 12y ago
    The offering is on another URL. That offering must have an imprint directly. Not linked on a 2nd page somewhere else.
- Rexxar 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Thanks - that wasn't there at launch time. Great they got it fixed.
3princip 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 ! :)
elcct 12y ago
I thought it is 0.02 EUR per month. That would be interesting... otherwise it seems to be too expensive.
mrsirduke 12y ago
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.
- alexchamberlain 12y ago
  Is it as simple as storing the backing file on an SSD?
  - mrsirduke 12y ago
    The documentation has the following to say on the subject: > Each server has access to a pool of local drives. These drives are exported to servers via the NBD protocol which effectively makes them network drives. However, network between these drives and C1 nodes are dedicated PCB tracks which ensures minimal latency and avoids network congestion. > There is no redundancy on these volumes, you need to handle redundancy on your side! They are archieved to a permanent storage when you start and stop your server. > Local volumes are 100% SSD drives which are able to deliver a lot of IOPS and are perfect for random read/write patterns. The maximum size of LSSD volumes is 150GB. Found on https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server#local_volumes https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server#local_volumes
    - ponytech 12y ago
      Do you think that would be acceptable for a database under heavy load, compared to a true dedicated server? Does anyone has tested this product and can share some benchmark?
afandian 12y ago
Any idea how a JVM would do on one of these?
- fulafel 12y ago
  I don't know if there are any commercial special purpouse ARM JVMs, but HotSpot/OpenJDK is pretty sad performance-wise on ARM.
  - CHY872 12y ago
    Yeah - was once instructed to use a full container (Glassfish) on ARM. A bootup took 5 minutes, requests took ten seconds. It was depressing.
  - nacnud 12y ago
    Oracle provide Java 8 for ARM: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-arm-downloads-2187472.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8... The performance on my little Raspberry Pi went up dramatically compared to OpenJDK when they released it (over a year ago).
    - fulafel 12y ago
      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?
- ape4 12y ago
  It would be pretty cheap to hire one of these boxes and try it out.
- MaBu 12y ago
  I tested it with OpenTripplanner (kinda opensource Google transit) on JVM with ARM 8 jre. Times for 380 requests are in seconds: ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l) (4) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 4 max time: 1655 mean time: 276.8 median time: 148.5 Digital ocean 1G memory: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz (1) 1.0.0- SNAPSHOT min time: 1 max time: 261 mean time: 51.0447368421 median time: 30.0 Digital ocean 2G memory: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz (2) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 1 max time: 407 mean time: 64.6447368421 median time: 34.0 Local PC: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz (4) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 0.0001 max time: 114 mean time: 21.9026331579 median time: 12.0 Free redshift cloud (512MB memory): Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz (2) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 5 max time: 7273 mean time: 417.507894737 median time: 103.5 This times doesn't count roundtrip time this is purely JVM time of graph search requests. All requests are serial. All tests except redhift are run with 1GB of JVM memory. Each test was run twice before to warm JVM this is mostly seen in ARM. DO speeds varies a lot. Even bigger VPS doesn't improve speed. ARM speeds doesn't vary a lot but sometimes during testing I didn't get an answer from a server, but this could also be a problem with OTP. I was impressed with ARM speed (it is much better then free openshift trial maybe because it only has 512MB) but now after free trial I'll probably move to DO the cheapest package, because for 11€ I can get better performance on DO even though it is varied. During normal use I can see the difference in speed between ARM and openshift in requests but not so much between ARM and DO. Probably ARM would work better when multiple request would come (It has 4 cores) and DO has 1/2.
jjoe 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  Not sure it qualifies, but http://raspberrycolocation.com/ http://raspberrycolocation.com/ has been around since 2013. But, you know, salestext is useless :)
  - jjoe 12y ago
    That's Raspberry Pi Colo, which is indeed different. I agree that salestext is mostly grandiose blurb but I oddly expected better from a tech startup. I suspect the wording came out straight of the horse's mouth ;)
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    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...
- trvz 12y ago
  "Oops, there's a problem... Out of Stock" - your company doesn't compete on the cloud part, so their claim still stands.
- xyby 12y ago
  After looking at your page I tend to side with Scaleway here. I see "Buy for $19.99" on that page. That does not feel very cloudy. I associate "cloud" with paying by the minute. Also that page seems not to be linked from your homepage. And the offer is not even available. "Not available" does not feel very cloudy either.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
tomjen3 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
    - bigiain 12y ago
      Fair enough. Some of the things I might do with these don't really have that "better than the x86 version" comparison in any rel sense. I've got a DigitalOcean droplet and a CloudAtCost VM (and several others) that exclusively get used as remote endpoints for reverse SSH tunnels. These would only need to be slightly less expensive for me to seriously consider adding a French jurisdiction one as well...
    - icebraining 12y ago
      What Python jit? Do you mean PyPy?
      - tomjen3 12y ago
        I assumed the standard python command used a JIT. Is this really not the case? In 2015?
cabirum 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
    - zumtar 12y ago
      I think you are quite unique in 'skipping text' written nearby text boxes where you are entering your credit-card number, expiry date and CVV2. I would recommend changing that behaviour ASAP ;)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - vikbez 12y ago
      dev here; made the text bold, and validation is now 2 euros :)
      - luisrudge 12y ago
        now you just need to enable paypal
- deleted 12y ago
mrsirduke 12y ago
It'd be nice to see FreeBSD adopt arm as a Tier 1 architecture with the increased adoption in the datacenter.
- pyvpx 12y ago
  it'd be nice if NetBSD was available from these cloud providers.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    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.
  - jedisct1 12y ago
    Waiting for OpenBSD.
- emaste 12y ago
  64-bit ARM as a Tier 1 FreeBSD architecture is on the roadmap. 32-bit ARM will get there too, I think, bit it's not being pushed as aggressively.
gbl08ma 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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=mariadb https://packages.debian.org/search?arch=armhf&keywords=maria...
  - gbl08ma 12y ago
    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.
kardos 12y ago
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.
teamhappy 12y ago
Anybody know if they (unofficially) support FreeBSD?
- gherkin 12y ago
  Support is on the way it seems: https://hub.scaleway.com/ https://hub.scaleway.com/
pvnick 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Dev here. just changed this, also it's now 2 euro for the validation :)
  - pvnick 12y ago
    Now that's good customer service. The new message style is much more prominent and obvious. I wish you guys the best of luck!
  - anonymousDan 12y ago
    Do you offer any access to trustzone?
Bud 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Help welcome :)
nly 12y ago
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.
- brianwawok 12y ago
  The not sharing CPU part. Worse average perf but better worse case perf.
- lbft 12y ago
  In theory, consistent performance (particularly CPU) since you aren't sharing a node. In practice, you're stuck dealing with the sort of headaches that come with doing something unusual, like repos not having packages you want. Overall it seemed to work reasonably during the beta but I'm surprised they weren't more aggressive with pricing. Hard to argue with the value if you are actually using the bandwidth, but otherwise not that interesting an offer from a practical perspective.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ Kimsufi offers true dedicated Atom boxes with SSDs for 10 GBPs / month. I also think that if you're "using the bandwidth", a $5/month Digital Ocean VM is probably a better value.
    - nly 12y ago
      Kimsufi are unmetered 100Mbps, and they seem to live up to that promise without throttling.
- jfindley 12y ago
  Compared to a VPS there's some security benefits. You can't meaningfully encrypt the disk of a VPS - as the decryption key can easily be read out of memory by the host. A physical server offers slightly more protection than this - although if there's no TPM not all that much. VMs are also bad at some specific tasks - they have issues with clock accuracy for example. One appeal of ARM, specifically, would be that it's cheap. Sadly these are based on ARMv7, which is a lot more limited than aarch64/ARMv8 and Intel CPUs. - but hopefully they or someone else will have an ARMv8 offering out soon.
thresh 12y ago
The CPU performance is a joke though. c1 from instantcloud.io: ubuntu@c1-10-1-33-39:~$ 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
oskarpearson 12y ago
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.)
m4tthumphrey 12y ago
Typo on servers button: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xspd7l0ld56dm2e/Screenshot%202015-04-02%2014.38.11.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xspd7l0ld56dm2e/Screenshot%202015-...
e40 12y ago
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.
- e40 12y ago
  Gigabyte has announced (but not released, as far as I can tell), this: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5423#ov http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5423#...
- xj9 12y ago
  I'd be interested in hearing about this as well.
- lsc 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point Why is that? What changed?
    - lsc 12y ago
      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.)
alecco 12y ago
What's the L2 cache size? They don't mention it anywhere, just plain benchmarks unrelated to memory speed.
- vikbez 12y ago
  CPU is MV78460; 2MB L2 cache doc: https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp/assets/Marvell-ArmadaXP-SoC-product%20brief.pdf https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp...
  - alecco 12y ago
    Cool, thanks for the link! Do you know the latency numbers? Edit: found this https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/files/System_Level_Benchmarking_Analysis_of_the_Cortex_A9_MPCore.pdf https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/file... (slide 17)
late2part 12y ago
Vive La France!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- frik 12y ago
  > What sort of ARM cpu's are they? 200Mhz Palm Pilot, or modern 1.4ghz A9 ones? 4-cores ARMv7 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 1Gbit/s network card source: https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-scaleway/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-sca...
masokupride 12y ago
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
- james33 12y ago
  This is online.net labs, it just has a new name.
- Syrup-tan 12y ago
  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-scaleway/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-sca...
kentt 12y ago
I assume the data center is in France. Is that correct?
- mikmak 12y ago
  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)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

326 points by wut42 12y ago

BillinghamJ 12y ago

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

rihegher 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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+Core+i7-5820K http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=Intel+Cor...
    - yasth 12y ago
      Just to give another data point closer to price an Atom N2800 (which kimsufi offers with ssd for the same monthly price) gets around 1100, so competitive but not world changingly so. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?dir=desc&q=atom+n2800 http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?dir=desc&q=...
    - rkrzr 12y ago
      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.
- ecliptik 12y ago
  To bad they're older 32-bit ARMv7 cpus. Ant serious ARM computing needs to use aarch64 for any type of serious scaling and performance. Glad to see they support Docker on them, that's one of the killer apps for ARM systems.

sushimako 12y ago

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

rihegher 12y ago
"How do I take advantage of the monthly billing? Each resource is billed per hour up to its monthly cap. The monthly cost of a resource is calculated by running the hourly rate for 500 hours. If a resource is used during more than 500 continuous hours in the month, the rest of the month is free."
- sushimako 12y ago
  Thanks, i missed the hourly/monthly switch.
ValentineC 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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).
- MetaCosm 12y ago
  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).

randunel 12y ago

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

icebraining 12y ago
Doesn't seem to be working, at least for Portuguese numbers. Tried resending it twice, but I'm still to receive anything.
- milankragujevic 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Our SMS provider has issues to send messages to foreign numbers :( If you write us a ticket, we'll validate your phone manually
jbub 12y ago
Yep also not working for Slovak number.
edouardb 12y ago
Or a free 15 mn trial at http://instantcloud.io http://instantcloud.io

hoodoof 12y ago

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

SwellJoe 12y ago
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 12y ago
  HP are manufacturing racks of high density arm servers. I would have thought someone would be renting them out.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    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.
hhw 12y ago
Because Intel destroys anything ARM has to offer in terms of price/performance or performance/watt, even on microservers since the Avotons came out. We're also going to see Xeon D's and Denvertons before proper ARM based server solutions come to market.

hbbio 12y ago

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 12y ago
There actually is an about section that tells just that: https://www.scaleway.com/faq https://www.scaleway.com/faq.

davedx 12y ago

Feedback: Clear information; some typos in the FAQ.

edouardb 12y ago
Where? :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- afandian 12y ago
  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'.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - afandian 12y ago
      I thought so, hence the question mark. The whole phrase 'Scaleway Infinit Storage' could be French, although perhaps it would be 'Storage Infinit Scaleway'.
  - edouardb 12y ago
    Fixed! thanks

jstsch 12y ago

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 :)

dotemacs 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  > 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 12y ago
    Exactly this: NetBSD & OpenBSD. Linux, although popular, is not the only operating system.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      Even FreeBSD would be better for my use cases. At least it supports pf.

lqdc13 12y ago

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 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  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/
nknighthb 12y ago
> This is like paying $10 every month for a raspberry pi + $40 SSD, or $75 in hardware. Raspberry Pis and SSDs do not come with bandwidth and redundant network, power, and cooling infrastructure.
niluje 12y ago
except the raspberry isn't in a datacenter, it won't probably have the same network speed, you can't move an IP from a raspberry to another one, you can't easily make snapshots, ...
hackerboos 12y ago
>I rather pay $40/mo for Hetzner 3930 CPU server with something like 30 VMs. Good luck when Hetzner null route your server when a competitor DDoSes you
- sfilipov 12y ago

zx2c4 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  but Online.net has its own network with a completely different policy ;) (AS12876)
  - Loic 12y ago
    Not really. Try to do a transfer of a single big backup file from a server with online.net and a server in Denmark. 6kB/s, yes, 6kB/s. Doing the same from a server with Gandi (VM), OVH (dedicated), was basically 100Mbps (it was what I had that time). To serve the French market only, Online.net is really good, but you do not have a consistent high quality network in Europe (I did not try outside EU).
  - aroch 12y ago
    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"

chinathrow 12y ago

No imprint, no address, no phone numbers. A french company. "Online SAS, a company registered in France." No imprint in France? Illegal.

icebraining 12y ago
Tried scrolling down on the Online.net's website? On the footer of their home page, they have their phone number, address and RCS number.
- chinathrow 12y ago
  The offering is on another URL. That offering must have an imprint directly. Not linked on a 2nd page somewhere else.
Rexxar 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Thanks - that wasn't there at launch time. Great they got it fixed.

3princip 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 ! :)

elcct 12y ago

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

mrsirduke 12y ago

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.

alexchamberlain 12y ago
Is it as simple as storing the backing file on an SSD?
- mrsirduke 12y ago
  The documentation has the following to say on the subject: > Each server has access to a pool of local drives. These drives are exported to servers via the NBD protocol which effectively makes them network drives. However, network between these drives and C1 nodes are dedicated PCB tracks which ensures minimal latency and avoids network congestion. > There is no redundancy on these volumes, you need to handle redundancy on your side! They are archieved to a permanent storage when you start and stop your server. > Local volumes are 100% SSD drives which are able to deliver a lot of IOPS and are perfect for random read/write patterns. The maximum size of LSSD volumes is 150GB. Found on https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server#local_volumes https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server#local_volumes
  - ponytech 12y ago
    Do you think that would be acceptable for a database under heavy load, compared to a true dedicated server? Does anyone has tested this product and can share some benchmark?

afandian 12y ago

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

fulafel 12y ago
I don't know if there are any commercial special purpouse ARM JVMs, but HotSpot/OpenJDK is pretty sad performance-wise on ARM.
- CHY872 12y ago
  Yeah - was once instructed to use a full container (Glassfish) on ARM. A bootup took 5 minutes, requests took ten seconds. It was depressing.
- nacnud 12y ago
  Oracle provide Java 8 for ARM: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-arm-downloads-2187472.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8... The performance on my little Raspberry Pi went up dramatically compared to OpenJDK when they released it (over a year ago).
  - fulafel 12y ago
    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?
ape4 12y ago
It would be pretty cheap to hire one of these boxes and try it out.
MaBu 12y ago
I tested it with OpenTripplanner (kinda opensource Google transit) on JVM with ARM 8 jre. Times for 380 requests are in seconds: ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l) (4) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 4 max time: 1655 mean time: 276.8 median time: 148.5 Digital ocean 1G memory: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz (1) 1.0.0- SNAPSHOT min time: 1 max time: 261 mean time: 51.0447368421 median time: 30.0 Digital ocean 2G memory: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz (2) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 1 max time: 407 mean time: 64.6447368421 median time: 34.0 Local PC: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz (4) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 0.0001 max time: 114 mean time: 21.9026331579 median time: 12.0 Free redshift cloud (512MB memory): Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz (2) 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT min time: 5 max time: 7273 mean time: 417.507894737 median time: 103.5 This times doesn't count roundtrip time this is purely JVM time of graph search requests. All requests are serial. All tests except redhift are run with 1GB of JVM memory. Each test was run twice before to warm JVM this is mostly seen in ARM. DO speeds varies a lot. Even bigger VPS doesn't improve speed. ARM speeds doesn't vary a lot but sometimes during testing I didn't get an answer from a server, but this could also be a problem with OTP. I was impressed with ARM speed (it is much better then free openshift trial maybe because it only has 512MB) but now after free trial I'll probably move to DO the cheapest package, because for 11€ I can get better performance on DO even though it is varied. During normal use I can see the difference in speed between ARM and openshift in requests but not so much between ARM and DO. Probably ARM would work better when multiple request would come (It has 4 cores) and DO has 1/2.

jjoe 12y ago

"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 12y ago
Not sure it qualifies, but http://raspberrycolocation.com/ http://raspberrycolocation.com/ has been around since 2013. But, you know, salestext is useless :)
- jjoe 12y ago
  That's Raspberry Pi Colo, which is indeed different. I agree that salestext is mostly grandiose blurb but I oddly expected better from a tech startup. I suspect the wording came out straight of the horse's mouth ;)
- nknighthb 12y ago
  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...
trvz 12y ago
"Oops, there's a problem... Out of Stock" - your company doesn't compete on the cloud part, so their claim still stands.
xyby 12y ago
After looking at your page I tend to side with Scaleway here. I see "Buy for $19.99" on that page. That does not feel very cloudy. I associate "cloud" with paying by the minute. Also that page seems not to be linked from your homepage. And the offer is not even available. "Not available" does not feel very cloudy either.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

tomjen3 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - bigiain 12y ago
    Fair enough. Some of the things I might do with these don't really have that "better than the x86 version" comparison in any rel sense. I've got a DigitalOcean droplet and a CloudAtCost VM (and several others) that exclusively get used as remote endpoints for reverse SSH tunnels. These would only need to be slightly less expensive for me to seriously consider adding a French jurisdiction one as well...
  - icebraining 12y ago
    What Python jit? Do you mean PyPy?
    - tomjen3 12y ago
      I assumed the standard python command used a JIT. Is this really not the case? In 2015?

cabirum 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - zumtar 12y ago
    I think you are quite unique in 'skipping text' written nearby text boxes where you are entering your credit-card number, expiry date and CVV2. I would recommend changing that behaviour ASAP ;)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - vikbez 12y ago
    dev here; made the text bold, and validation is now 2 euros :)
    - luisrudge 12y ago
      now you just need to enable paypal
deleted 12y ago

mrsirduke 12y ago

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

pyvpx 12y ago
it'd be nice if NetBSD was available from these cloud providers.
- justincormack 12y ago
  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.
- jedisct1 12y ago
  Waiting for OpenBSD.
emaste 12y ago
64-bit ARM as a Tier 1 FreeBSD architecture is on the roadmap. 32-bit ARM will get there too, I think, bit it's not being pushed as aggressively.

gbl08ma 12y ago

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 12y ago
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=mariadb https://packages.debian.org/search?arch=armhf&keywords=maria...
- gbl08ma 12y ago
  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.

kardos 12y ago

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.

teamhappy 12y ago

Anybody know if they (unofficially) support FreeBSD?

gherkin 12y ago
Support is on the way it seems: https://hub.scaleway.com/ https://hub.scaleway.com/

pvnick 12y ago

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 12y ago
Dev here. just changed this, also it's now 2 euro for the validation :)
- pvnick 12y ago
  Now that's good customer service. The new message style is much more prominent and obvious. I wish you guys the best of luck!
- anonymousDan 12y ago
  Do you offer any access to trustzone?

Bud 12y ago

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 12y ago
Help welcome :)

nly 12y ago

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.

brianwawok 12y ago
The not sharing CPU part. Worse average perf but better worse case perf.
lbft 12y ago
In theory, consistent performance (particularly CPU) since you aren't sharing a node. In practice, you're stuck dealing with the sort of headaches that come with doing something unusual, like repos not having packages you want. Overall it seemed to work reasonably during the beta but I'm surprised they weren't more aggressive with pricing. Hard to argue with the value if you are actually using the bandwidth, but otherwise not that interesting an offer from a practical perspective.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/ Kimsufi offers true dedicated Atom boxes with SSDs for 10 GBPs / month. I also think that if you're "using the bandwidth", a $5/month Digital Ocean VM is probably a better value.
  - nly 12y ago
    Kimsufi are unmetered 100Mbps, and they seem to live up to that promise without throttling.
jfindley 12y ago
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.

thresh 12y ago

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

oskarpearson 12y ago

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.)

m4tthumphrey 12y ago

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

e40 12y ago

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.

e40 12y ago
Gigabyte has announced (but not released, as far as I can tell), this: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5423#ov http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5423#...
xj9 12y ago
I'd be interested in hearing about this as well.
lsc 12y ago
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 12y ago
  once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point Why is that? What changed?
  - lsc 12y ago
    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.)

alecco 12y ago

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

vikbez 12y ago
CPU is MV78460; 2MB L2 cache doc: https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp/assets/Marvell-ArmadaXP-SoC-product%20brief.pdf https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp...
- alecco 12y ago
  Cool, thanks for the link! Do you know the latency numbers? Edit: found this https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/files/System_Level_Benchmarking_Analysis_of_the_Cortex_A9_MPCore.pdf https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/file... (slide 17)

late2part 12y ago

Vive La France!

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frik 12y ago
> What sort of ARM cpu's are they? 200Mhz Palm Pilot, or modern 1.4ghz A9 ones? 4-cores ARMv7 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 1Gbit/s network card source: https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-scaleway/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-sca...

masokupride 12y ago

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

james33 12y ago
This is online.net labs, it just has a new name.
Syrup-tan 12y ago
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-scaleway/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-sca...

kentt 12y ago

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

mikmak 12y ago
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)

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