Scaleway out of servers and IP's

[willie]

Maybe it's just some backend problem or maybe they're really out of stock, but at the moment they aren't exactly competing with Amazon.  Their UI is reporting that they are out of both C1 ARM servers and public IP addreses.  I don't have any right now and have sort of wanted to get one, but the point of the product is that you can spin up 100's of them when you have a big task to do, so not being able to get even one is not a good sign.  Back to the x86 mines until OVH releases some more of their own ARM cloud product, I guess.

 

[drmike]

#Lowendsupplychain  


I can't see OVH launching ARM as a normal product.  It will cannibalize their other server sales and drain VPS / cloud.  It's able to be done, but complex financial puzzle that could quickly take money off the books.  I know they launched and pulled back...


I've been saying to watch the ARM server space for years.  Maturity of software keeps pressing forward and not bad vs. cost on something like Scaleway.


If Scaleway offered other payment (i.e. PayPal) I'd probably hold several of them.   Growth cap clearly is much larger than current stock or lack thereof.

 

[willie]

OVH's arm64 is still in alpha test, they released 100 of them in September and then some more recently (but gone by the time I found out).  They are still a lot slower than a current x86 on a per-core basis but they have a lot of cores on a die, putting the box in the middle of the E5 range in total capacity.  I don't think OVH is particularly delighted to shovel endless money to Intel if their customers are willing to use ARM servers to get their work done.  And people do care about per-core speed sometimes.  (OVH's ARM cores should be around 3x Scaleway's speed or 1/3 of Intel's).


I signed up for Scaleway with a credit card and it worked fine.  I'm not too worried, I trust Paypal a heck of a lot less.  They just don't seem to have enough inventory for the type of service they are advertising.  I do want one of those servers so I'll keep trying to snag one I guess.

 

[drmike]

ARM stuff is going to clock speed performance lag Intel for a while...  comparing mobile CPUs essentially to this point vs. workstation and server grade CPUs.  That will change.


Economics and margins is a big thing here.  Scaleway smacked things to the floor with that ~$3.40 per board US figure.  Take fees out and not much left.  Sure VPS sells down in this zone.  However 1x gear to maintain and babysit.  This is slews of things that can go wrong hardware side.   Doable, but each board is say optimistically $3 income....  Going to need MANY of these to make real money.  I can't see any of these companies existing on $3/per customer income.   Even $6-9 isn't real sustainable for physical gear sales.


Precisely the reason, one of to select something like Scaleway, dedicated cores.  Definite need for this.  Premature probably for most apps as optimization for anything CPU burning isn't there on this kit, yet.


Who is going to launch such in the US ?

 

[willie]

I don't think Scaleway makes money on those €3 C1's.   They are underpowered even compared to any of the hip mobile phones this year.  They were selling them at €10 and my guess is nobody was buying and they had to do something with them.  I expect it's an older design and they have something better in the pipeline, maybe using a modern phone chip that should be about 3x faster and 64 bits.  If they sold that at €10 it would be sort of in line with the Atom C2750 they're now selling at €16.  Hetzner has that Odroid board (about 2x the speed of a C1) but monthly only and with a setup fee, so I wonder if anyone is buying those.  The  theory that the €3 C1 is basically a fire sale makes me think that the out of stock situation is essentially permanent: they'll get some released by customers and sell them again, but they won't deploy any more new ones since they're waiting for better hardware.
  This is just my guessing though: there's no solid evidence.

 

[willie]

Well, they have blogged about it and said they are adding more hardware:


https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/11/03/scaleway-is-growing-too-fast-out-of-stock/


I was able to get a server just now so I guess I'll hold onto it for a while.  I had been thinking of spinning them up and down as needed.

 

[drmike]

I don't think Scaleway makes money on those €3 C1's.   They are underpowered even compared to any of the hip mobile phones this year.  They were selling them at €10 and my guess is nobody was buying and they had to do something with them.  I expect it's an older design and they have something better in the pipeline, maybe using a modern phone chip that should be about 3x faster and 64 bits.  If they sold that at €10 it would be sort of in line with the Atom C2750 they're now selling at €16.  Hetzner has that Odroid board (about 2x the speed of a C1) but monthly only and with a setup fee, so I wonder if anyone is buying those.  The  theory that the €3 C1 is basically a fire sale makes me think that the out of stock situation is essentially permanent: they'll get some released by customers and sell them again, but they won't deploy any more new ones since they're waiting for better hardware.
  This is just my guessing though: there's no solid evidence.

I think Scaleway is part of a bigger slush fund someone has.  Read: owners loaded to gills with money.  Smells like a tax write disruption for market share.


I can't see Scaleway continuing this at a grand scale... Limited stock is just plain sensible in any biz, especially in one where margins are so slim. (yeah I hear cheap VPS folks saying $3+ per month is a lot of coin, well it isn't.  No real business can make such work.  There are models from other subscriptions that are far less internationally (read: cellphone).  But the costs are fixed, increases to monthly spend aren't so extreme, and customers pay for and ideally are profited on for handsets.


Hetzner and their setup fees... no surer way to drive sales away than a setup fee on something non exceptional... 

 

[drmike]

Also worth noting that Scaleway users were complaining recently about unbalanced bandwidth throughput to and from the internet.


I believe it was upload side that was somewhere around 1/10th of the speed.  


I'd consider this to likely be part of them ceasing open orders for Scaleway.  


Network when running lots of Torrents and similar distributed P2P is going to take a beating.

 

[willie]

They do say they're working on some network upgrades.  You might be right about disruption for market share.  But nobody builds an operation like Online/Scaleway to lose money in the long run. 


I think they are not trying to compete with monthly VPS.  They're trying to be more like a miniature Amazon EC2.  Part of that model is there are ALWAYS instances available.  If someone tries to spin up 100 instances for a half day Hadoop task and the instances aren't there, the product has failed, and if that happens too often you lose the customer.  So you need either a lot of idle hardware (do that by pricing high enough to control demand) or something like Amazon spot market (pre-emptable instances that cost less than regular instances, but if you use one, you can get booted off with 30 seconds notice by someone else who is willing to pay more).


In that model, being out of stock is pretty bad news.

 

[wlanboy]

Also worth noting that Scaleway users were complaining recently about unbalanced bandwidth throughput to and from the internet.

Second that. More likely they got out of router capacity than rack space.


Bad news for their scale-cloud server message.

 

[drmike]

Second that. More likely they got out of router capacity than rack space.


Bad news for their scale-cloud server message.

That's my take on it too.  I remain interested in Scaleway, if they can build out what they have, take on new growth and keep it stable. I am not holding my breath though, they seemed to have hit the brakes on this experiment hard and sudden.


I view ARM as financially destructive at this point.  It will wreck many companies income / server sales here soon.  No different than what phones + tablets via ARM have done to Wintel sales.  Fact is, I am running my own lowly code, scrapers, etc. all on self hosted LAN based ARM these days.


Looking over at Raspberry Pi quad core at power meter right now, whole 2.4 watts   What isn't there to love.  I plug in my workstation to the meter I am going to vomit. Sure my workstation is a ton more horsepower, but, vast number of tasks are fine and able to be delegated to ARM with no significant loss of time, enjoyment, etc. while saving a bundle and heck, isolating some things further like I am fond of.

 

[TheLinuxBug]

In my experience they have more often ran out of IP addresses than actual servers.  In cases where no IP address is available, you can change to use a local IP and it should let you generate the server.  Now this can be annoying unless you already have another server with them as otherwise you won't be able to access your new server from the internet, only locally.  I have had issues in the past with provisioning a new server because of no IPs but have always been able to sping up a new server with a local IP. If you don't need a server with direct internet access, this seems to work out fine.


my 2 cents.


Cheers!

 

[willie]

As of a couple months ago, they were frequently out of servers, and as a separate matter, also frequently out of IP's.  I.e. they'd often be out of one or the other and sometimes out of both.  I don't know what if anything they've changed since then but I was able to spin up a server with an IP a couple weeks ago.  I also remember they did a big network upgrade around November which might have eased up the network problems.  I have 1 server there and it's been working fine in all regards, though that's a small sample.  I'd like them to get ipv6 working since I mostly want to use these things as infrastructure anyway, so I don't need ipv4 addresses.

 

[OSTKCabal]

Their problem has everything to do with a lack of IPs, as well as (at the time) fairly significant network congestion. They've mainly fixed the network congestion, but IPs are kinda hard to come by - as you well know.

 

[DomainBop]

Their problem has everything to do with a lack of IPs, as well as (at the time) fairly significant network congestion. They've mainly fixed the network congestion, but IPs are kinda hard to come by - as you well know.

Poor planning for growth but IPs shouldn't be a problem for any Iliad brand.  All they need to do is ask Xavier. They're sitting on 11.1 million IPv4 on AS12322 and another 245K on AS12876.

 

[OSTKCabal]

Poor planning for growth but IPs shouldn't be a problem for any Iliad brand.  All they need to do is ask Xavier. They're sitting on 11.1 million IPv4 on AS12322 and another 245K on AS12876.

Seems to me they don't want to give them up. Cloud services are wasteful on IPv4 and they operate in a relatively low-profit area of the industry; maybe they're holding them back for sale?

 

[drmike]

11 million IPs... bahahha wowzers