cloudparts

Scaleway

The cloud arm of France’s iliad group: VMs, GPUs, bare-metal servers, Kubernetes and managed databases in four three-zone regions in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan.

What it is
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Used for
Virtual machines,Block storage,Object storage,Container orchestration
Type
Commercial product
Made by
Scaleway SAS
License
Proprietary
Facts checked
24 October 2026
Website

What it is

Scaleway sells a full public cloud from European data centers. Instances are VMs in many families, from tiny shared STARDUST and DEV types to dedicated-vCPU and memory-heavy ones; GPU Instances offer NVIDIA L4, L40S, H100 and B300 cards. Elastic Metal servers are whole machines with no hypervisor, delivered to your account within minutes and billed by the hour or the month, and Dedibox is the older line of monthly dedicated servers. Around them sit Block Storage, Object Storage with multi-zone, one-zone and Glacier classes, VPCs, load balancers, Kapsule (managed Kubernetes), managed databases and serverless functions and containers.

There are four regions, Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan, each with three availability zones, though not every product is in every region: Milan, the newest, has four CPU instance families and no GPUs or Elastic Metal, and GPUs run only in Paris and Warsaw. Instance list prices include outgoing traffic and IPv6 addresses; storage and public IPv4 addresses are billed on top. The smallest instance, STARDUST1-S with 1 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, costs €0.0006 an hour, about €0.43 a month.

Scaleway is a subsidiary of the French iliad group. It presents itself as a sovereign European cloud: in April 2026 the European Commission picked it as one of four providers under its Cloud III purchasing system.

Why teams pick it

  • A full cloud catalog, from cheap VMs to bare metal, GPUs, Kubernetes and managed databases, run by a European company in European data centers
  • Every region has three availability zones, so zone-redundant setups don’t need a second region
  • Outgoing traffic is included in instance list prices, which keeps bandwidth-heavy workloads predictable
  • Bare metal with cloud integration: Elastic Metal servers are created through the same API, CLI, SDKs and Terraform provider as VMs

Watch out for

  • Regions are uneven: Milan has a much smaller catalog, GPUs are only in Paris and Warsaw, and some instance types exist in only one Amsterdam zone
  • Storage and public IPv4 addresses are not in the list prices, and Elastic Metal’s monthly price needs a one-time commitment fee equal to a month
  • Deleting an Instance deletes all its volumes and their data, so anything worth keeping should be snapshotted or detached first
  • Elastic Metal servers arrive in minutes, but installing the operating system can take up to an hour

Alternatives

What all infrastructure as a service (iaas) have in common →Compare side by side →
OVHcloudCommercialA French cloud provider that builds its own servers and data centers and sells bare-metal servers, an OpenStack-based public cloud and hosted private clouds.HetznerCommercialA German host that rents cloud VMs by the hour and whole dedicated servers by the month from its own data center parks in Germany and Finland, plus cloud-only sites in the US and Singapore.Cherry ServersCommercialA Lithuanian host that rents dedicated bare-metal servers through an API, billed by the hour, as spot capacity or by the month, from seven locations in Europe, the US and Asia.

How it fits with other technologies

Create, stop and delete an Instance with the `scw` CLI · bash

# list image labels, then create a DEV1-S in the first Paris zone
scw marketplace image list
scw instance server create zone=fr-par-1 image=ubuntu_noble type=DEV1-S

# deleting also deletes the Instance's volumes
scw instance server stop <SERVER_ID>
scw instance server delete <SERVER_ID>

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Scaleway yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from1999–2026

Scaleway grew out of Online, a French web host and domain registrar that started in 1999 within the iliad group. Dedibox began renting dedicated servers in 2006 and merged into Online in 2010; Online opened its third Paris-area data center, DC3 in Vitry-sur-Seine, in 2012. In 2013 it previewed labs.online.net, servers rented by the hour on dedicated ARM hardware without virtualization.

The service left beta as Scaleway in April 2015. Instead of competing with AWS and DigitalOcean on their terms, it had designed its own ARM servers: chips first built for phones need little power, cooling and space, so 912 computers fit in one rack. In September 2015 it cut the price of its BareMetal server, 4 dedicated ARM cores, 2 GB of memory and 50 GB of SSD, by 70%, from €9.99 to €2.99 a month. x86 servers followed in 2016.

In December 2018 Scaleway became the group’s main brand, with the old hosting offers renamed “Online by Scaleway”. That year it opened what it calls the first three-zone cloud region from a European provider, followed by managed Kubernetes in 2020, a GPU supercomputer in 2023 and serverless AI inference in 2025. Today it runs four three-zone regions in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy.

Why it’s built this way

Its own ARM servers instead of commodity x86
ARM chips designed for phones draw little power and take little space, so Scaleway could pack 912 servers into a rack and sell a dedicated machine for €2.99 a month.
Dedicated hardware without a hypervisor
The first offer rented whole physical ARM servers by the hour, so customers got dedicated CPU cores rather than a share of a host; Elastic Metal keeps that model today.
Three availability zones in every region
Scaleway built its regions with three zones from 2018 so customers can spread a service across separate sites within one region.

Timeline

  1. 1999

    Online starts web hosting and domain registration

  2. 2006

    Dedibox begins renting dedicated servers

  3. 2013

    labs.online.net previews ARM servers without virtualization

  4. 2015

    Renamed Scaleway out of beta in April; price cut to €2.99 a month in September

  5. 2018

    Scaleway becomes the group’s main brand; first three-zone region

  6. 2020

    Kapsule, managed Kubernetes

  7. 2026

    Selected for the European Commission’s Cloud III purchasing system

Sources7 · facts checked 24 October 2026

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