Scaleway

What Is Scaleway?

The European cloud infrastructure market has grown by over 25% annually since 2022, and yet the three US hyperscalers still command roughly 70% of European cloud spending. For organisations that want European-hosted infrastructure without the complexity of OVHcloud or the lock-in of AWS, Scaleway has carved out a distinctive position: the developer-friendly European cloud.

Scaleway is a French cloud provider and subsidiary of Iliad Group — the telecoms giant behind Free, one of France's largest mobile and broadband operators. That parentage matters: it gives Scaleway access to significant network infrastructure and the financial backing of a publicly traded company, while maintaining the startup-like product development speed that makes its platform feel genuinely modern.

Operating from data centers in Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw, Scaleway offers a full cloud platform: compute instances, bare metal (Elastic Metal), managed Kubernetes (Kapsule and the multi-cloud Kosmos), serverless containers and functions, S3-compatible object storage, managed databases, GPU instances, and more. What sets it apart from OVHcloud and Hetzner is the developer experience — a clean console, well-designed API, comprehensive CLI, and documentation that developers actually want to read.

Scaleway has also built a reputation for innovation. It was among the first European providers to offer Apple Silicon cloud instances for iOS and macOS CI/CD pipelines, serverless containers that deploy Docker images without infrastructure management, and multi-cloud Kubernetes that spans multiple providers. For startups and mid-market companies that want European infrastructure with modern tooling, Scaleway is a compelling choice.

Key Features

Compute Instances

Scaleway's instance range covers development workloads (DEV1 series with shared CPUs), general purpose (GP1 with dedicated resources), and specialised options including GPU instances. All instances are billed per second with hourly granularity, with no minimum commitment. The pricing is transparent — what you see is what you pay, with no hidden bandwidth charges eating into your budget.

The standout in the compute lineup is the Apple Silicon offering: Mac mini M1 and M2 instances available as cloud resources. For teams building iOS or macOS applications that need CI/CD infrastructure, this eliminates the need to maintain physical Mac hardware. Few other European providers offer anything comparable.

Elastic Metal (Bare Metal)

Elastic Metal provides dedicated bare metal servers that provision in minutes rather than hours. You get full root access, dedicated hardware with no virtualisation overhead, and the ability to install any operating system. Pricing starts competitively and includes generous bandwidth allocations. For workloads that need consistent performance — databases, high-frequency trading systems, game servers — bare metal eliminates the noisy-neighbour problem entirely.

Managed Kubernetes

Scaleway offers two Kubernetes products. Kapsule is the standard managed Kubernetes service for single-region clusters with a free control plane. Kosmos is more ambitious: a multi-cloud Kubernetes offering that lets you add worker nodes from other cloud providers or on-premise infrastructure to a single managed cluster. This is genuinely useful for organisations running hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.

Both products support standard Kubernetes APIs, Helm, and integrate with Scaleway's private networking, load balancers, and container registry.

Serverless Platform

Scaleway's serverless offerings include Serverless Containers (deploy any Docker image, pay only for execution time) and Serverless Functions (event-driven compute for supported runtimes). These are simpler and more focused than AWS Lambda's ecosystem, but they cover the core use cases well: API backends, webhook handlers, scheduled tasks, and event processing.

GPU Cloud for AI

Scaleway provides NVIDIA GPU instances (H100, L4, A100) for AI training and inference. With hourly billing and EU data residency, this is attractive for European AI teams that need GPU compute without sending training data to US providers. The GPU instances integrate with Scaleway's managed Kubernetes for distributed training workflows.

Pricing

Scaleway's pricing philosophy is transparency. Instances are billed per second, prices are listed clearly on the website, and there are no hidden charges for bandwidth or API calls that catch you off guard.

Development instances (DEV1 series) start from approximately 8 EUR per month for 2 vCPU and 2 GB RAM. General purpose instances (GP1-S) with 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM run around 22 EUR per month. These prices are competitive with DigitalOcean and significantly below AWS for equivalent specifications.

Elastic Metal bare metal servers start from approximately 50 EUR per month, which includes dedicated hardware and generous bandwidth. Object storage is priced per GB stored plus per-GB egress, with egress pricing notably lower than AWS S3.

The free tier for the managed Kubernetes control plane is a meaningful cost saving — AWS EKS charges per hour for the control plane, which adds up. With Scaleway, you pay only for the worker nodes.

Enterprise pricing involves custom agreements with volume discounts, dedicated account management, and priority support.

EU Compliance & Data Privacy

Scaleway is a French company (Scaleway SAS) operating exclusively from EU data centers in Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw. As a subsidiary of Iliad Group, which is publicly traded on Euronext Paris, there is full corporate transparency and no ambiguity about jurisdiction.

The company holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications, and has HDS (Health Data Hosting) certification for French healthcare data. For GDPR compliance, Scaleway's EU-only infrastructure means no data transfers outside the European Economic Area, eliminating the legal uncertainty that affects US-headquartered providers operating under the CLOUD Act.

Scaleway has positioned itself as part of the European sovereign cloud movement, participating in Gaia-X and actively pursuing additional certifications for regulated workloads.

Who It's Best For

Developer-focused startups and scale-ups that want modern cloud infrastructure with a clean console, good CLI, and well-documented APIs. If you have outgrown shared hosting and want something better than a raw VPS, Scaleway hits the sweet spot.

DevOps teams running Kubernetes who want managed orchestration without per-cluster fees, with the option to go multi-cloud via Kosmos.

iOS/macOS development teams that need Apple Silicon CI/CD infrastructure in the cloud without maintaining physical hardware.

European AI teams requiring GPU compute (H100, A100) with EU data residency for training and inference workloads.

The Verdict

Scaleway is the European cloud provider that feels like it was designed by developers, for developers. The console is clean, the API is well-designed, the pricing is transparent, and the product line balances breadth with focus. It lacks the global footprint and enterprise maturity of the hyperscalers, and its service catalogue is narrower than OVHcloud's. But for teams that value developer experience, transparent pricing, and EU data sovereignty, Scaleway delivers a cloud platform that is genuinely pleasant to use — which is more than most infrastructure providers can claim.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Scaleway compare to DigitalOcean?

Scaleway offers a similar developer-friendly experience at comparable prices, but with EU data residency and GDPR compliance built in. Scaleway also provides more advanced offerings like bare metal servers, Apple Silicon instances, multi-cloud Kubernetes, and GPU compute that DigitalOcean does not match.

Is Scaleway suitable for production workloads?

Yes. Scaleway serves thousands of production workloads across startups and mid-market companies. SLAs of 99.95-99.99% are available depending on the product. For mission-critical enterprise workloads, evaluate whether the three-region footprint meets your geographic redundancy requirements.

Does Scaleway offer a free trial?

Scaleway does not offer a traditional free trial, but new accounts receive free credits to explore the platform. Some services, like the Kubernetes control plane, are permanently free — you only pay for worker nodes.

Can I migrate from AWS to Scaleway?

Yes. Scaleway's S3-compatible object storage, standard Kubernetes APIs, and Terraform provider make migration straightforward for most infrastructure workloads. The main considerations are service availability (check that Scaleway offers equivalents for the AWS services you use) and geographic coverage.

What is the difference between Kapsule and Kosmos?

Kapsule is Scaleway's standard managed Kubernetes service for single-region clusters using Scaleway compute nodes. Kosmos extends this to multi-cloud: you can add worker nodes from other providers or on-premise servers to a single managed Kubernetes cluster, creating a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture.