Scaleway New Cloud Servers for Intensive Workloads | Hacker News Reader

Scaleway New Cloud Servers for Intensive Workloads

blog.online.net

70 pointsedouardb22 comments

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For comparison:

https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-md

https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-ent

These boxes are better options if you plan to run such nodes for 3+ months.

If anyone interested, I've checked the CPU, it's Xeon D-1531 2.2 GHz.

> To improve readability of our product range, we're changing the naming convention of our cloud servers. Our new servers are called X64-60GB and X64-120GB. The starter cloud servers, the VC1, will be renamed at the end of the preview to follow the new convention.

I'm all for this, the names have never made sense to me.

But `X64-60GB` has 10 cores, and `X64-120GB` 12. I think it's certainly conceivable that someone pick whichever for the core count; not (just) the amount of RAM.

Why not `10X64-60GB` and `12X64-120GB`?

Then there won't be problems again if a future type, `10X64-120GB` under this scheme say, is offered.

Fascinating. My 2014 2.5 GHz i7 MbPro is just 10-15% faster in 7z benchmark.

When you say 'just', would you expect it to be even faster? Does the 7z benchmark not favour multicore machines or vast RAM?

10-15% corresponds pretty directly to the GHz difference - according to @lossolo [0] these are 2.2GHz; your 2.5GHz is about 14% faster.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13591040

I expected it to be even slower than that - usually happens with discount dedicated hardware. Not this time, apparently.

Just need these servers in the US with the same pricing, and I'd jump all over it.

OVH in Canada is close

I am buffled by the relatively low prices. Much, much lower than DigitalOcean. Is this service stable? How can I be sure that they won't go out of business in a few months...?

Scaleway is owned and operated by Online.net[0], part of Iliad[1].

It's probably a safe assumption that DigitalOcean is in more danger of "going out of business in a few months" than Scaleway is.

0. https://online.net 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad_SA

Exactly, came here to say that. The only problem is that Scaleway can't satisfy all of the demand, so you won't be able to order some things at some point in time.

The only problem? What about their garbage storage system, only 1 IPv4 per server, the object storage which isn't useable for over a year because they have to scale up resources. As much as I like Online, the system is not really useable for most projects in production. Also the network in Amsterdam is quite unstable.

Wow you actually got somewhere! I crashed at verifying credit card.

Since they are Europe-based they require "secure 3d". My Amex with $65,000 limit that I use personally and for business works flawlessly in USA and outside for last 7 years. But not with those guys.

After back and forth battle with their ticketing system, I was advised by engineer to "finally get a secure 3d card". :) Scaleway should send said engineer for a trip to USA to see we don't use much of Secure 3d here. In fact, my personal account rep said Amex will never implement it because it only adds unnecessary layer and actually doesn't make things safer.

Until Scaleway fix their broken payment system, I will stick with DigitalOcean and few other mature and reliable hosting companies, because how the heck am I supposed to trust them with my mission-critical systems, when they cannot even figure their own payment page.

You could also say parent company will do just fine if it needs to cut Scaleway loose, bit Digital Ocean would have everything to lose, therefore Digital Ocean is a safer bet.

A few reasons:

1) They are based in france, near a source of cheap power.

2) They are not big fat Xeons, they are Xeon-Ds, which are a quarter as hot than a e5-26xx.

3) https://www.supermicro.nl/products/nfo/Xeon-D.cfm

you can fit 12 servers in 3u. Plus they are dirt cheap, I assume ~$400-600 a unit.

Interesting. That's way cheaper than I was expecting, most higher than 4-core Xeon-D configurations are more like $1000/node. I'm seeing a 24 node 3U server for $16k.

http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-multi-node-servers-micro...

Yup, and thats the $lol price. You can expect that price to at least halve with volumes of 50+

beware, just signed up for a 2€ server, but the only option how you can do backups is to shutdown the server, do a snapshot and turn it back on again. That doesn't seem very sophisticated. Could be, that you can just mount an extra volume and use rsync, not sure.

> Could be, that you can just mount an extra volume and use rsync, not sure.

You can't mount an extra volume on the cheapskate servers - I tried recently (in order to test my contribution to their open source efforts, of all things...) and only found out after it had shutdown, backed up, and created the new volume.

The backup disk, and the extra one I couldn't mount meant my bill went up to ~€5 for the month.

Would've been nice if on creating the extra volume it said "Are you sure? You don't have a server you can attach this too at the moment" or something.

I have a VC1S (or what seems to be now start cloud für 2,99€) in Paris.

Network is stable and fast enough for me (iperf ~500Mbit to 800Mbit to Hetzner / DFN).

CPUs are Intel Atom Avoton - these are slower than a 'real' Xeon Core, not as slow as the dedicated ARM boxes. I'm just serving static content and do some rsync on the box for that it's perfectly fine. If you are on an overbooked Droplet you have similiar/worse performance.

Everything else is pretty much not so great. IPv6 is a joke you get a single address + gateway /127 - Snapshots only work when machine is offline - it's not possible to easily resize or move machines between Paris/Amsterdam.

Storage is over nbd afaik not local but it was always fast enough for me.

You don't have control over your kernel and you have to use what Scaleway offers you - althrough there are some hacks that are not reboot-safe to fiddle with iPXE - so you can even run *BSD - https://community.online.net/t/openbsd-on-a-vc1/1933

But you get worse deals for 2,99€ from most VPN providers. If you want to use it for something serious I'd be careful through and do some throughough testing and benchmarking before.

Parent company Illiad is a big french telecom operator. They have their own datacenters, big network connectivity and already big deals with hardware manufacturers.

They are know for cutting the cost by running project with very small and smart team with hacker culture.

Wonder why the smaller plans don't have the Xeon D as well. The single thread performance of those Atoms suck so much that it's not worth using it for any web app.

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