Scaleway is a French Cloud computing and web hosting company, founded in 1999 and a majority owned subsidiary of the Iliad group. As many players, the company started as a traditional server hosting company. Since 2015, they are building their cloud computing business.
Features & Services
Scaleway has a good set of services. Worth highlighting are the serverless services for Functions, Containers and Jobs and the serverless SQL database. A unique speciality in the Scaleway service portfolio are the managed Mac machines. Scaleway offers several managed LLMs that are very easy to use behind a OpenAI-compatible API.
Data Centres
Scaleway operates a total of 10 data centres:
- 4 data centres in the Paris area (DC2 PAR1, DC3 PAR1, DC4, DC5 PAR2).
- 3 data centres are located in Amsterdam, Netherlands (AMS1, AMS2, AMS3).
- 3 data centres in Warsaw, Poland (WAW1, WAW2, WAW3).
Check the map of data centres for the geography of the data centres.
Environmental Policy
Scaleway has a very distinct and holistic environmental policy, based on several pillars:
- Energy: Scaleway’s policy regarding energy consumption is twofold: the data centers are designed use as minimal electricity as possible. Furthermore, the company strives to use low-carbon energy and seems to offset fossil energy usage, e.g. for the data centers in Poland (source).
- Water consumption: the data centers are designed to minimize water consumption for cooling.
- Circular economy: Scaleway claims to use hardware with an average lifetime of 10 years, vs. 5 years industry average.
- Measurement & Transparency: the company is measuring its own environmental footprint and is being transparent about it. Furthermore, it has an elaborate Enviromental Impact Calculator for its cloud users.
Read more about Scaleway’s environmental policy.
Conclusion
Scaleway offers a highly appealing package designed to cater to projects of all sizes. It is accessible to individuals and provides a range of services that enable true scale-to-zero functionality, spanning both compute and database solutions. Additionally, Scaleway stands out by offering unique services that many other European providers have yet to introduce, such as an IoT hub.
Coupled with a strong environmental policy, a sleek and user-friendly console, and exceptional customer support, Scaleway presents a comprehensive and highly competitive offering.
