AWS vs Scaleway

What AWS is

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform. Offering over 200 fully featured services, it helps startups move faster while lowering costs for giant government agencies. From databases to machine learning and IoT, it provides everything a digital infrastructure needs in seconds. AWS is the backbone of the internet; the world's largest companies like Netflix and Airbnb live on this secure and scalable infrastructure.

What Scaleway is

Scaleway is a proprietary European cloud with virtual and GPU instances, bare metal, object/block storage, networking, Kubernetes, databases and serverless services. Virtual instances are pay-as-you-go by powered-on time; the advertised compute rate excludes storage and attached public IPv4, while list prices include IPv6 and egress. Savings Plans trade commitment for discounts. On raw instances the customer owns operating-system updates, access, application security, availability and backup design; managed products move only specified responsibilities to Scaleway.

What AWS is built to do

Amazon EC2

Rent flexible and scalable virtual servers in the cloud.

AWS Lambda

A serverless architecture that runs your code only when triggered.

Amazon S3

The most secure object storage service for any type of data on the web.

Amazon SageMaker

Build, train, and deploy machine learning models at high speed.

What Scaleway is built to do

Virtual instances

Offers development, general-purpose, memory, compute, GPU and other VM families.

Storage choices

Attaches local or block volumes and provides object, archive and snapshot services.

Managed cloud products

Includes Kubernetes, databases, registries and serverless services with product-specific boundaries.

Usage and commitments

Combines hourly use with optional Savings Plan discounts for committed consumption.

Choose AWS if

• Cloud Engineers, Large Enterprises, and Scalable Startups.

Choose Scaleway if

• Development and production VMs whose instance family exists in the required availability zones
• European cloud strategies after legal, residency and disaster-recovery review
• Workloads benefiting from included VM egress and explicit hourly component pricing

Skip Scaleway if

• The architecture requires a service or global region footprint absent from the current catalog
• The team assumes storage, IPv4, snapshots and support are included in the compute price
• No owner exists for instance hardening, OS updates, backups and multi-zone recovery

AWS: pros & cons

• Infinite Scalability: Your systems grow automatically as your traffic increases.
• Global Infrastructure: Low-latency data centers available in every major global region.
• Pay-as-you-go: You only pay for the actual resources your application consumes.
• Security Certifications: Meets the world's strictest standards like HIPAA and PCI.
• Extreme Complexity: It's easy to get lost among thousands of features; requires expertise.
• Hidden Costs: Can lead to unexpectedly high bills if not properly configured.
• Support Costs: Professional technical support requires an additional monthly fee.

Scaleway: pros & cons

• Published component pricing: Instance families show hourly and approximate monthly compute rates by availability zone.
• Egress-inclusive VM pricing: Current list rates include outbound traffic and IPv6 for virtual instances.
• European footprint: Products run in named European regions and availability zones.
• Automation options: Console, APIs, CLI and infrastructure-as-code tooling support programmatic operations.
• Compute is not the full bill: Local/block storage, snapshots and attached public IPv4 are separate line items.
• Powered-on time bills: CPU instances accrue charges during startup and standby, not only active workload execution.
• Availability varies: Instance families, SLAs and products differ by region and availability zone.
• VM operations are customer-owned: OS patching, configuration, access control, backups and application resilience are not managed away.