Scaleway is retiring its ARM instances | Hacker News Reader

Scaleway is retiring its ARM instances

scaleway.com

Congratulations AWS, now your only competition in the "public cloud arm64" space died. F.

As much as I don't like the Awful Bezos Monopoly and their bandwidth pricing and stuff, the Graviton has been excellent and now the super-fast Graviton2 is coming. While Scaleway couldn't unbreak something as basic as booting a local EFI file instead of iPXE for months [1] AWS employees have been sending patches to upstream OSes [2] so it's pretty obvious which provider is serious about ARM. Hopefully there will be more than one. HuaweiCloud should put the Kunpeng instances in the international regions. Maybe Microsoft Azure will eventually do it too? (They've been using ARM internally..)

[1] https://community.scaleway.com/t/freebsd-on-arm64/6678/5

[2] https://reviews.freebsd.org/D24065

>> the physical servers hosting them are indeed randomly affected by several stability issues

this may cast a shadow on ARM64 servers credibility.

they used to design their first generation of arm servers in-house. it looked like a blade server with slottable cpu(or was it the whole system on a micro-board?). check the video from 2014(at the end) for some glimple on a physical machine https://blog.scaleway.com/2014/online-labs-public-preview/?f...

The reason I have submitted the migration document instead of official announcement is because there isn't any as of writing.

I received a mail few hours back informing[1] that the ARM64/C2 instances would be retired by Dec 1 and technical support will end on Jul 1. The reason for the retirement is vague, the email mentions 'several stability issues'.

I've personally been running one of my projects on ARM64[2] for nearly a year and haven't had any major issues except reboot require power cycling.

The announcement sounds fishy, it's not the first time Scaleway has retired its low tier instances[3], I suspect it do more with their Business than actual stability. I've recommended Scaleway's ARM instances several times, even here on HN; But now I'm reconsidering my options as I've been using ARM for my compute needs for a while now to align with my carbon goals.

Update: Official forum discussion[4], looks like others feel the same way.

[1] Someone else have posted the email content on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g11uuj/scaleway...

[2]https://needgap.com

[3]https://blog.scaleway.com/2018/introducing-scaleway-nextgen-...

[4]https://community.scaleway.com/t/c2-arm64-instances-end-of-l...

Thank you for your feedback and sorry for your disappointment.

As explained in our email, Scaleway’s C2 and ARM Instances suffer from random instabilities that prevent us to keep market them, even if they were not all impacted by these issues.

We would love to propose new ARM Instances in the future, but nothing is planned at the moment. We’re just investigating the hardware, but be assured that you will be kept informed.

Regards -AA

I appreciate the reply, but I would expect a detailed technical analysis of the issues faced by scaleway with these instances and a more detailed reasoning in a separate blog post.

The mention of this retirement on just the migration document seems unforthcoming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com