There are a couple of European Cloud providers available, who generally do not get much attention in comparison to the big 3 - AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. One of these cloud providers, which I find interesting to explore, is Scaleway.
They call themselves “Europe’s empowering cloud provider”, operate completely within European Union, and emphasizes its data sovereignty support for workloads in Europe. The products and services range seems to be a decent set of capabilities that go beyond just providing virtual servers. This includes a notable focus on AI and AI-oriented products.
Scaleway considerations
In a previous blog post about European cloud considerations, I outlined a few key areas to think about.
Some concepts and terminology
In Scaleway you have accounts in which you provision your resources, and each resource belong to a project. A project is also part of an organization.
There are two types of accounts, corporate, and personal accounts. The difference between those is essentially that you have to provide a VAT Id for a corporate account and your bills with be excluding VAT, while personal accounts will be billed including VAT.
You can convert from a personal account to a corporate account, but not the other way around. When you sign up, you will have the choice of 4 account types: Corporate, Startup, Consultant/Freelancer, and Personal Project. The first 3 are all the underlying corporate account.
There is a validation process that takes place after signup which needs to be completed before you have full access to all products and services - before that the access is limited.
In an organization, you have an Owner, and you can also have Members and Guests. Members exist only within your organization, while guests are invited into the organization, but are not part of it.
Documentation
Based on my initial check on the documentation, I think their documentation has a pretty good structure. There is a consistency for each product or product area, where you will find an overview, a concepts section, and a quickstart section as well. For many products you may also have how-to’s with a bit more cookbook examples, an API/CLI section, an FAQ, and additional/technical details sections.
Not all products/services have all these sections, but you learn what to expect in each section.
Pricing
The pricing page is relatively simple for each product. I am happy to see that data transfer costs are pretty predictable, since in most cases egress and ingress are free, within a given possible bandwidth - and you pay for that possible bandwidth. This makes more sense than paying for the amount of data transferred. One exception is the object storage, where you could pay for egress to internet or inter-region beyond 75 GB/month.
Overall though a thumbs up for the pricing model.
Security model
Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies can be set on three types of principals: IAM users, IAM groups, and IAM applications. These policies have rules in them, which can have a scope to be set at either the organization or project level. The rules also include permission sets that define which permissions are applicable. You cannot set them on individual resources (yet), although you can apply restrictions using condition expressions, which is an optional part of these rules.
API keys are used to call the Scaleway APIs, which consist of a token id, and a secret key. These can be limited in time, and be attached to a principal. User API keys can only be generated by the users themselves.
Services and products
Scaleway said that by the end of 2024 they had 120 products. Not quite sure what is a separate product though.
The offerings include virtual machines, and dedicated servers - including Apple silicon. There are also managed databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB). There are also IoT hub, transactional email, and managed Apache Spark offerings. A noticeable focus is on AI offerings as well, including GPUs for the machines, model-as-a-service, generative APIs.
Containers are handled via their managed Kubernetes offerings, which is also what their serverless compute offerings (serverless functions, containers, jobs) are using under the hood. They also have edge services, load balancers, VPCs, connections to on-prem in the networking space.
Also messaging middleware like NATS is part of their offering.
There is also a partner service, which seems to be an option for a Scaleway Partner to manage multiple customer environments.
It seems to be a good mix of building blocks to use.
Locality
Currently, Scaleway has 3 regions, in Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw. Each region has multiple (at least 3) availability zones.
The availability zones are logical groupings of distinct physical data centers.
My understanding is that new regions are planned in Sweden and Italy.
CLI, SDKs and infrastructure as code
You can work with Scaleway APIs through various tools:
- Call web APIs directly, e.g. via
curl - Scaleway CLI (command-line interface)
- Scaleway SDKs - Python, Javascript, and Go is available.
- Terraform/OpenTofu provider
- Pulumi provider (community-developed)
Additional info and Community
There is a Scaleway Slack, which seems to be a bit low traffic. Scaleway has a YouTube channel also with some videos.
It was interesting to see that in the client testimonial videos, the customers pointed to that they said they were in a partnership with Scaleway, that were beneficial for both partners.
There is a Scaleway Learning section separate from the documentation, where you can do certification exams for Scaleway. It seems though that you have to pay to access the learning material via the payment for the exam itself. Each exam costs 300 Euro, and this includes some learning material.
I think that it is a bit unfortunate that Scaleway does not have a guided learning path which is not behind a paywall. It is ok that if they charge for certification, that they provide some paid for material together with that. But it would also be good for adoption to have guided learning material that is not behind a paywall, or at least that you will have an insight into what you pay for.
Next steps
This was a brief intro to my initial exploration of Scaleway, which I think looks like a promising option among European cloud providers.
Next up here will be some hands-on projects setting up solutions in Scaleway. There may also be comparisons with similar solutions in AWS.