Scaleway

Scaleway is a French cloud computing company that has established itself as one of Europe's leading infrastructure providers. Founded in 1999 as Online.net and later rebranded to Scaleway, the company is a subsidiary of Iliad Group, one of France's largest telecommunications companies. This backing provides Scaleway with significant resources and infrastructure investment capabilities, making it a formidable European alternative to the US cloud giants.

European Data Sovereignty

One of Scaleway's most compelling advantages is its commitment to European data sovereignty. All data centers are located within the European Union - in Paris (France), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Warsaw (Poland). This means your data never leaves EU jurisdiction, providing strong protection under GDPR and ensuring compliance with European data protection regulations.

For businesses subject to data residency requirements or those concerned about the implications of US laws like the CLOUD Act, Scaleway offers a genuine European alternative. The company is not subject to US jurisdiction, and French data protection laws provide additional safeguards for customer data.

Comprehensive Cloud Services

Scaleway offers a full stack of cloud services comparable to major providers. Their compute offerings include Development Instances (DEV1) for testing and development, General Purpose Instances (GP1) for production workloads, and specialized instances for compute-intensive or memory-intensive applications. The pricing is highly competitive, with DEV1-S instances starting at just 0.0025 per hour.

Kubernetes Kapsule, Scaleway's managed Kubernetes service, provides an easy way to deploy containerized applications. The control plane is free, and you only pay for the worker nodes. This makes it an excellent choice for teams looking to adopt Kubernetes without the operational overhead of managing the control plane themselves.

Object Storage and Databases

Scaleway Object Storage is S3-compatible, making migration from AWS straightforward. The service offers multi-AZ redundancy within each region and competitive pricing for both storage and data transfer. For developers already familiar with S3 APIs, the transition is seamless.

Managed database services include PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. These fully managed offerings handle backups, updates, and high availability, allowing development teams to focus on their applications rather than database administration. The databases are deployed within Scaleway's secure infrastructure, ensuring data remains within the EU.

GPU Instances for AI and ML

Scaleway has invested heavily in GPU infrastructure, offering instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs for machine learning and AI workloads. Their GPU instances are particularly attractive for European companies developing AI applications who want to keep their training data and models within EU jurisdiction. The availability of powerful GPU instances at competitive prices makes Scaleway a viable alternative to US providers for AI development.

Serverless Computing

Scaleway Functions provides serverless computing capabilities, allowing developers to run code without managing servers. Supporting multiple runtimes including Node.js, Python, Go, and Rust, the service scales automatically based on demand. Serverless Containers extends this capability to containerized applications, providing a bridge between traditional container deployments and fully serverless architectures.

Developer Experience

Scaleway provides excellent developer tools including a comprehensive CLI, Terraform provider, and SDKs for popular programming languages. The web console is well-designed and intuitive, making it easy to manage resources. API documentation is thorough, and the company maintains active community forums and documentation.

The company also offers a generous free tier that includes 75GB of object storage, a development instance, and various other resources. This allows developers to experiment with the platform without financial commitment.

Environmental Commitment

Scaleway operates with a strong environmental focus. Their data centers are designed for energy efficiency, and the company has committed to using renewable energy sources. The DC5 data center in Paris is particularly notable for its innovative cooling system that uses adiabatic cooling, significantly reducing energy consumption compared to traditional data centers.

Pricing and Value

Scaleway's pricing is transparent and competitive. Unlike some cloud providers with complex pricing structures, Scaleway aims for simplicity. Compute instances are billed by the hour with clear pricing, and there are no hidden egress fees for reasonable usage levels. This predictability is valuable for businesses planning their cloud budgets.

The company offers committed use discounts for customers who can commit to longer-term usage, providing additional savings for established workloads. Volume discounts on storage and bandwidth also help larger deployments reduce costs.

Considerations

While Scaleway offers a comprehensive service portfolio, it's smaller than hyperscale providers like AWS or Google Cloud. This means fewer regions (though all in the EU) and potentially fewer niche services. For most workloads, the available services are more than sufficient, but organizations with very specific requirements should verify availability.

Support options include community forums, documentation, and paid support tiers. Enterprise customers can access dedicated support, but smaller users may find the community-based support model requires more self-service problem solving.