scaleway

Scaleway, a wholly owned subsidiary of Iliad Group--the French telecommunications giant behind Free Mobile and Freebox--is Europe's leading sovereign cloud provider, purpose-built for data residency, regulatory compliance, and developer agility. With three strategically located, ISO 27001- and SOC 2-certified data centers in Paris (FR-PA), Amsterdam (NL-AM), and Warsaw (PL-WAW), Scaleway delivers ultra-low-latency infrastructure across Western and Central Europe--fully aligned with GDPR, CNIL guidelines, and France's Sovereign Cloud initiative. Its bare-metal portfolio starts at just €3.99/month for the DEV1-S instance (2 vCPUs, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe), offering transparent, hourly-billed, no-contract compute with full root access--ideal for cost-conscious startups and edge workloads. For AI/ML teams, Scaleway provides production-grade GPU instances powered by NVIDIA L4 (inference-optimized), A10 (balanced training/inference), and A100 (HPC-grade), all accessible via intuitive CLI, Terraform provider, and native integration with Kapsule--their fully managed, CNCF-compliant Kubernetes service featuring auto-scaling, integrated monitoring, and seamless CNI/CRI abstraction. Complementing this are serverless Functions (event-driven, cold-start <100ms), S3-compatible Object Storage with lifecycle policies and cross-region replication, and a unified API-first platform where every resource--from block storage to load balancers--is versioned, documented, and scriptable. All pricing is published upfront, with no hidden fees or egress charges within the EU, multilingual documentation (EN, FR, DE, ES), and responsive engineering-led support. Scaleway excels for EU-based fintechs needing audit-ready infrastructure, ML researchers requiring affordable, on-demand GPU access without vendor lock-in, and privacy-first SaaS startups prioritizing data sovereignty over hyperscaler sprawl. With data centers in Paris (FR-SD5, FR-SD6), Amsterdam (NL-AII), and Warsaw (PL-WAW), it delivers sub-10ms latency across Western Europe--critical for real-time applications and compliance-sensitive workloads. Its bare-metal servers (ARM64 and x86_64) start at €3.99/month (DEV1-S), featuring dedicated resources without virtualization overhead. GPU instances--including NVIDIA L4, A10, and A100--are available on-demand or reserved, with hourly billing from €0.32 (L4) to €3.49 (A100). The Scaleway Object Storage (S3-compatible) offers 99.99% durability and geo-replication options, while the managed Kubernetes (Kapsule) and serverless (Functions) platforms integrate natively with Terraform and CLI tools. Documentation is comprehensive, multilingual (EN/FR/DE), and includes detailed API reference, tutorials, and GitHub samples. Users praise its transparent pricing, predictable billing (no overage charges), and responsive support via ticket and community Slack. The platform earns strong user ratings for value and ease of setup, though some note limited global reach outside Europe and fewer enterprise-grade SLAs than hyperscalers. Integration with CI/CD pipelines is seamless via native GitHub Actions support, and the Scaleway CLI v2 supports full infrastructure-as-code workflows.