Accidentally came across a mention of Scaleway hosting .

Pros:

• 4 cores
• 2 gigabytes of RAM
• 50 gigabyte SSD drive
• bare-metal! (that is, there are no, even purely theoretical, virtualization overheads)
• for all this only 3 euros per month! Very cheap!

But there is a feature: this is an ARM processor. Yes Yes! This is a 4-core ARM processor.

First steps

He registered, fed them the card number. Everything is OK, I’m not worried.

I chose the OS. There are three versions of Ubuntu, two versions of Debian, and several other different distributions. I chose Ubuntu 14.04 - which I know well.
Update: List of available OSs: Gentoo, ubuntu 12.04, ubuntu 14.04, ubuntu 15.04, archlinux, fedora 22, openSUSE 13.2, Alpine Linux 3.2, Debian Jessie (8.1), Debian Wheezy (7.8).
Update2: Thanks to MrFrizzy, I saw that they can have an instance from the docker image. You can use images from ImageHub or upload your own.

Startanul new instance. Unlike, for example, Digital Ocean, here you cannot make SSH with a password, only with a key. Immediately inspires respect. This is ideologically closer to AWS, but I generate the key here myself (AWS can generate on its side). When I went there, I found a pw file with its password in the system in the root home folder. OK, God be with him.

But in the SSH daemon settings , password login (PasswordAuthentication parameter) was allowed ! Which I consider quite a hole. Somehow it looks damp.

Access via ssh to this instance is allowed for the root user, which I consider a minus, but not a big one. It’s done the same on Digital Ocean, but AWS uses the ubuntu user, which is added to sudoers to perform all administrative functions without a password. I think this scheme is more familiar. But, in fact, this is a matter of taste.

By the way, the data center is located in France. Ping from me about 52ms. It's fine for me.

Iron

What kind of processor is there?


So, I have at my disposal a 32 bit ARM v7 processor. About 4 cores - the true truth. 1332 bogomips ... well ... It's close to some Pentium III / 666. On the AWS microinstance, for example, 3591 is a mogomips, in addition there is a 64 bit processor and OS.

That is, potentially, 4 * 1332 = 5328, will be faster than microinstance, even in a jump. AWS Microinstance, this is known to be a burstable instance. That is, it can give great performance in a short time. As far as I understand, just 3591 he will give me in a short time. And then it will slow down. I do not have exact figures how much it will slow down, but subjective sensations - several times.

More information about the system:

# uname -a
Linux scw-b715a9 3.2.34-30 # 17 SMP Mon Apr 13 15:53:45 UTC 2015 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU / Linux

I learned almost nothing new.

Another look at the memory.


Well, really 2 gigabytes, not fooled. Well, the kernel in memory takes a little less than I’m used to recently on x86-64 Linux.

Tests

Update5: On the advice in the comments, I ran tests. As far as I understand, dd is not a very good test for IOPS, but I give it here.


It is not difficult to pump data in large pieces. Reduce the block to 4k.


I think that ~ 100 MB, I ran into a gigabit network interface. I also conducted a test with a 1k block.


Here the drop in speed is already noticeable. But IOPS is still very large. Not sure if the disk limitation is probably a limitation, again, of the network interface. But in general, everything looks pretty good.

Software

And how to deploy your projects on it?

And let's try docker ... Here I was disappointed. He says that it works only on 64 bit systems. Although I have doubts that he even knows how to work on ARM. But at least he threw a mistake at me, about 64 bits. In general, it disappears.
Update3: Thanks to everyone who posted in the comment ( MrFrizzy , alexac , WGH ). In fact, you cannot install docker in the way that is recommended by the docker itself: docs.docker.com/linux/step_one. From the repositories of Ubunta, it is installed nominally, but there is version 1.4, which is not applicable. But you can use docker images at the start of the instance.

Another option that I previously used several times for my pet projects is bitnami . He, of course, also does not support ARM. Also disappears.

I’ll have to install everything myself ...

I put nginx, php5-fpm, mysql-server from the repository. Everything was found right away, everything worked.

Oracle java8 for the ARM processor from the webupd8team / java repository also shipped and worked. Actually, for current projects java I don't need. But to check for the future, at least its presence was necessary.

conclusions

Cloud hosting on ARM processors exists! And from the first of September it is very cheap. Of course, I still want to drive a real site, under some sort of well-known CMS under load ... But this is not now. More tests of the same system can be found in this article . True, they also promised some real test, but they didn’t.