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Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

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Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#31
I'm using Scaleway for some experimental stuff, and it's great value for that.

I did not like that I am bound to their kernel on bare metal. There are setups that require kernel modules they don't provide, like DRBD. I got the modules to compile and work in the end, but it was not fun and will probably break on some future update. This is not how I expected it to be on "bare metal".

Also that prevents you from using the Xen hypervisor, which again I would not expect from "bare metal".

You only get a single IPv4-Adress per system, which not only is a burden to virtualization, but also larger container-setups.

So I found little value in the "bare metal"-part, but it's still great value if you compare it to other VM offerings.

If you treat it like a VM (or use one of their VMs), you need to be aware that disks are not redundant and their content (or at least the changes since the last boot) are gone on a crash or hardware failure. You need to mirror or replicate it yourself, or design around it on a higher level of the stack. There is no option to attach a persistent disk that would survive a hardware failure and could be attached to a replacement host/VM.

So in the end scaleway is a weird mix for me: for rented VMs I expect the platform/provider to take care of some basic reliability and redundancy stuff. For bare metal I expect to be able to setup all of that myself without trouble.

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think not having ECC Ram is a problem? I'm on scaleway, and I see zero harm coming from that. Different usage?

For personal use perhaps it doesn't. For professional news having data corruption is not something that you'd like, especially if you handle client data (as in backup) or even more importantly if you handle payments. Overall for pro use lack of ECC is just a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Na. There is a bunch of stuff that can go wrong, but there are also a bunch of safeguards that do not rely on ECC. Backups have checksums. TCP has checksums. I mean, if it is the same price I'd have no problem picking ECC, but I see the danger of it having any impact on what I and 99% people on servers are doing at 0.00000001%.

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#33
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think not having ECC Ram is a problem? I'm on scaleway, and I see zero harm coming from that. Different usage?

Row hammer exploits. Someone else running on that server can read and flip your ram and generally pwn you.

ECC only mitigates RowHammer-like exploitations, it doesn't prevents them altogether.

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think not having ECC Ram is a problem? I'm on scaleway, and I see zero harm coming from that. Different usage?

Row hammer exploits. Someone else running on that server can read and flip your ram and generally pwn you.

Combined with a working exploit and when not running on the bare metal server that might actually be a valid point. I know when they were released those attacks looked pretty scary, and ECC was supposed to maybe help. I'm not actually sure it does help completely, and that here aren't other measures already in place by now?

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We design and manufacture our own server hardware so we can optimize our cost. We select each component of our servers to get high quality servers at the best price and remove all unneeded components. The result is that you get a server with the best price-performance ratio.

Whereas the competition enjoys paying extra, and carefully tries to find new unneeded components? Yeah, didn't think so... I guess the truth is a mixture of "larger willingness to cut corners" and "aiming for a lower margin". That's not a bad thing. It's just that in a market as transparent and competitive as this, it's really hard to be better along every single dimension.

Since we design our own hardware, we put exactly what we want and need into them. We share some components like power, network, and casing.

This means for example :

- one integrated network switch/router for 18 servers; no need to buy an external cisco/juniper/whatever

- one dual power supply for the whole gang instead of 19 (18 servers + switch)

- less metal/plastic parts

We try to reuse hardware designs and software from one iteration to another when possible.

In short, we do have less "unneeded components". Equivalent designs (thinking at moonshot for example) are expensive, so to achieve same density it's more expensive to buy existing solutions than what we design & build.

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#36
I was really excited about Scaleway until shit started going wrong with my test C1 box there. They sent an email asking me to update my "boot script" (kernel version). You can only do this, it seems, when the box is shut down, except there is no power management on the box. The only option they have is to copy the contents of the box to cold storage. Great. It took 4 hours or so.

When I brought the box back online it would stay online for about a day and then lock up for no reason. I spun up a new one, copied the data from the old volume to the new one. Why can't I clone or detach a volume from a running box? It was a read-only data-only volume. The copying between two boxes was at 12Mbps... In the end, the new box had the same lockup problem. Not it's not my software. It had been running without changes for 6 months prior with no downtime. Oh and in the end it locked up again and when it came back online in rescue mode, it was basically a brand new install. My home directory was gone, root password had been reset, all the configuration was not there.

Also no IPv6 for bare metal ARM boxes.

tl;dr: I moved on because of inflexible control panel and random hardware issues. Really wanted to like it.

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#38
I was checking out their terms of service (https://www.scaleway.com/terms/), a few clauses in there seem pretty restrictive, such as:

>Users are required to use decent and respectful language. All abusive, violent or hateful sentiments are totally prohibited.

>The propagation of data, images or sounds that may constitute defamation, an insult, denigration or an infringement of privacy, image rights, good morals or public order.

Does anyone who knows this better than I anticipate that this would cause problems if one wanted to host, for example, an internet message board with this service?

Obviously one would comply with DMCAs, delete illegal content, etc, but I can't imagine forcing all users to use "decent and respectful language", for example. Is this something you just generally ignore until a specific problem with the provider surfaces?

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#39
post #38

I was checking out their terms of service ( https://www.scaleway.com/terms/ ), a few clauses in there seem pretty restrictive, such as: >Users are required to use decent and respectful language. All abusive, violent or hateful sentiments are totally prohibited. >The propagation of data, images or sounds that may constitute defamation, an insult, denigration or an infringement of privacy, image rights, good morals or…

>Does anyone who knows this better than I anticipate that this would cause problems if one wanted to host, for example, an internet message board with this service?

Probably anything illegal in France or Netherlands. The sentence sum the most common thing you could do that could get you in legal troubles if you cross some lines.

Re: Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam

#40
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except AWS have ECC RAM, Scaleway doesn't.

Well, for one I don't care much, I run my hobby stuff on there, not my mission critical services, so cheap is good, even with some really minor drawbacks. Secondly, I could not find a source if Scaleway uses ECC or not...

Like the other guy says, you have to ask them.

In general, if a provider doesn't write ECC - it's almost always not ECC because it's a selling point.

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