Google, who is frequently criticised for killing projects, guarantees cloud services for at least one year from the announcement of deprecation, and typically gives much longer.
Scaleway gave zero notice of the removal of the ability to start ARM64 instances. That means if you had a CI pipeline or automated system which started those instances, it just broke on you. Hope your clients don't mind random downtime!
You're going to have to port all your code to x64 or another cloud provider to restore service. That could take weeks. Weeks of downtime!
Don't touch Scaleway, ever, especially if you want an SLA.
I agree with you and I would like to share what just happened to me with Scaleway.
Scheduled maintenance on their network, notified 1 week in advance. "No action required", they said. My IPv6-only VPS stopped to be reachable from outside and I could not get the web console. I opened a ticket and after some ineffective suggestions (trying to switch the machine on and off or go into recovery mode) as I was sure there was a problem in their new network, I found a workaround by myself: buying a floating IPv4 address, attaching it to the machine and using Cloudflare for IPv6. Today, after 16 days since the high priority ticket has been created, I got a reply with a solution: create a new instance, one month of refund.
Tip: there are many good alternatives to be considered even if you are looking for <= 5 $ VPS that have way less shortcomings and many times the cheapest VPS on Scaleway is above 10 $/month because of prolonged shortages. I would consider it only for hobby projects which require a lot of network traffic (VPS network is not capped).
Thanks for your feedback.The creation of new C2 and ARM Instances is no longer possible for customers who do not use these offers, but we have considered those who still use them. Their quota per offer has not been reduced to zero, but to the number of instances they have plus one, which lets some flexibility to prepare migration before end of life on December 1st, 2020.Regarding SLA, we work hard to satisfy you and we invite you to give a try to our General Purpose Instances: https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-purpos.... They have been designed for critical production needs. Regards -AA
I guess most companies could easily just run their code on x64 without porting necessary. How many clients would have ARM64-specific code running that absolutely would not run on x64? What Scaleway did is not ideal, but I think you are blowing it out of proportion.
How many people with generic non-ARM specific code would bother running it on an ARM instance?
I have arm instances for the sole reason that they are cheaper than x86 instances.
Well, they were pretty cheap so if you could live slower execution python/java worked fine as an example
I run my website on an AWS a1 instance, but I'm not many people :D
But really the answer is "enough people for Amazon to invest heavily in manufacturing custom CPUs"
I agree, especially with the consideration that they gave us an 8 month notice to vacate currently allocated instances.
It's highly unlikely to be a showstopper, but you have to actually install, configure and test the software on those new images.
Scaleway just decided that you're not shipping any code today, you're retooling your configuration.
I don't think it's that bad, but it's not something a platform you trust to run anything valuable on would ever do.
Not everyone has a "one click build" process.
The images run on the machines might be binaries licensed from vendors which are ARM. Have fun calling every vendor and saying "Yeah, I know you completed your contract with us 4 years ago, but would you mind recompiling the whole project as x64?".
I've been put off from being a Scaleway customer after having been in contact with their customer support and them doing this is not really changing my opinion about them.
They've been marked as "low in stock" for 2 years. It's obvious the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
tbf. they gave people who had used the instances two days notice. Not zero, but not necessarily not-zero in a meaningful way.