From nuclear fallout shelter to data center (Paris)
blog.scaleway.com
blog.scaleway.com
Located in Riga, Latvia, that is now underneath a city park. It was once a nuclear shelter in times of CCCP / USSR. Visitors of park were once interviewed do they know where do those doors in the park lead and what is currently there... people didn't know :)
Do they provide any benefit other than look? At first glance, it seems like a big expense to garnish the walls of a data center. So I'm curious if the ceramic tiles provide any other benefit, or is it all just eye candy for tours of potential investors/customers?
To me, it looks a lot like a "fun project" for them, a bit useless though: even-though it has quite reinforced walls, it's very small for a DC, it required a huge lot of work to make it ready for servers, the building itself must have cost a huge amount compared to a location in an industrial zone, it's not the best place in a city to put equipment like generators, there is no space for expansion, connectivity for networking and power with multiple source must have been a big challenge due to constrained access, ...
Finally, knowing quite well how the Parisian metro gets infiltrations all the time in the stations, I find it crazy of them to take it as reference: if their situation is comparable, they are in for a lot of trouble over time.
Thanks!
A lot of software limitations of their products aren’t documented, an example: don’t expect to put more than 40k files in one single object storage bucket. It’s written nowhere and when you’ll start encountering strange errors with your apps you’ll have to deal with the support team. First you need to pass the triage level where people have no clue about whatever is technical, then after a few days you will go higher in the chain and finally be redirected at someone in charge of the production who will announce you that kind of limitation.
Disclaimer: I’ve been a customer since the very start of Scaleway (attracted by the low prices), then got dissatisfied a lot and asked my account being deleted last week.
I think the rough edges got fewer, they started offering a lot more managed/PaaS services, and de facto raised prices (mostly by cutting a lot of the low-cost offerings and/or making them a lot less attractive, plus some actual price increases).
I am still using them for hobby projects and didn't have issues with my running instances, but did occasionally run into issues when stopping/starting them (e.g. resource exhaustion, long delays, etc.).
They really like obfuscating the actual price by showing everything in hours instead of months, so you're paying "zero point zero something" with no easy way to see what the actual cost per month is. It's possible to find the information but they really push the hourly price.