Why Scaleway and European Sovereignty?
The European market offers many alternatives, ranging from cost-efficient bare-metal solutions to platforms that closely resemble the American hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP). We chose to run an extensive trial with Scaleway. One major advantage is that Scaleway is a truly European provider, with data centers located within Europe — including one in Amsterdam. This makes it significantly easier to comply with local regulations and European guidelines around data sovereignty.
What Did We Test?
Within a defined testing budget, we set up a modern, scalable infrastructure to evaluate whether Scaleway meets our requirements. During the test we successfully implemented:
- Automation (IaC): Full infrastructure management through Terraform, integrated with GitHub Actions.
- Kubernetes & Serverless: For flexible and modern application hosting.
- Networking & Security: A secured private network with strict Identity & Access Management (IAM) policies.
- Monitoring: Performance monitoring and observability through Grafana dashboards.
The Results: A Mature and Cost-Effective Alternative
The test was successful: all components ran smoothly.
- Advantages: Everything can be managed through Infrastructure as Code, and the platform is mature enough for most workloads.The biggest advantage? Pricing. While cloud pricing always fluctuates, we see that European alternatives can often be tens of percent cheaper than the major American hyperscalers.
- Limitations: Scaleway currently offers fewer advanced features than hyperscalers. This becomes noticeable mainly in very complex networking configurations.
What About Migration?
Does the idea of migrating away from Google, AWS, or Azure hold you back? That’s understandable. Thanks to our Terraform-based setup, workloads can theoretically be moved relatively easily. In practice, we have not yet completed a full production migration to Scaleway.
Once we finalize our first production migration project, we will share an honest follow-up, including lessons learned and potential pitfalls, in a future blog post.
Ready to Explore the Switch? Try Our Quick Scan
At the moment, many of our production environments still run on the well-known hyperscalers. But this test shows that Scaleway can be an excellent, local, and more cost-efficient alternative for many workloads. Such as test environments or specific production systems.
Curious whether your environment could run significantly cheaper in a secure European cloud?
We offer a free Quick Scan. We analyze your current setup, estimate the potential savings, and map out what a migration could look like.
Get in touch with us to explore the possibilities.
