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. Since then, Scaleway is fully focusing on creating a compelling, fully integrated cloud product. For the operation of data centres, Scaleway is partnering with local partners.
Features & Services
Scaleway has a wide set of services that are well integrated. 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.
Scaleway view themselves as a software company primarily. This shines through in a very polished product that is well-designed through and through – from the console over the API and the SDK, to the Terraform provider.
Developer Experience
Scaleway is following an API-first approach with their product development. The console, the SDK, Terraform provider and all other ways to interact with the Scaleway cloud are following the API. New products are typically released through the API at beta launch. Once stabilized, Terraform and the other tooling follows and the product is surfaced in the console.
API
The Scaleway API follows API design best practices and is straightforward to use.
With Terraform, CLI and SDKs on top of the API, the situations where it is necessary to fall back to it may be fairly rare. One case would be when using Beta products, where the other developer tooling has not yet caught up.
Terraform Provider
The Terraform provider follows the API and is therefore straightforward and easy to use. The official documentation can be found on the Terraform registry page about the Scaleway Provider.
An end to end example for using the Scaleway Terraform provider is here: N8N on a Scaleway Instance.
Scaleway CLI
The Command Line Interface (Scaleway CLI) as well follows the API in its structure and with naming and parameters.
SDKs
Scaleway is officially maintaining SDKs for Go, Javascript and Python. Because they are all following the API structure and naming, they are very easy to use and to transition between.
Console
The Scaleway console is very clean, very well designed and intuitive to get around.
The price for cleanness of the console is that not all resource data is surfaced. E.g. if you must collect all resource IDs for terraform import, you may have to fall back to using the API or the CLI for some of them.
Other Tools and Integrations
There are a number of additional tools and integrations, such as the
Scaleway Developers Tools contains a full overview over all available tools and integrations. A noteworthy highlight is the integration with the Serverless Framework: Scaleway Plugin for Serverless Framework.
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.
As a Scaleway user, you can track your own environmental footprint with the Scaleway Environmental Footprint Calculator. Right now, not all services are included in the Environmental Footprint Calculator, but Scaleway is working on adding more and more services.
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.
