Scaleway, a French company based in Paris, owned by Illiad telecommunication provider, just announced public availability of their managed Kubernetes solution called Kapsule. Scaleway has 5 data centers, 4 in France and 1 in Netherlands, but at the moment Kapsule (public beta version) is available just in the datacenter in Paris. DigitalOcean just got competition, so we can compare the pricing schemes in the later text.

Kapsule service includes block storage (PersistentVolumeClaim), pool autoscaling, control-plane’s upgrade, S3 compatible object storage and container registry with free bandwidth. You won’t pay any special fee for Kapsule, you pay just for instances, load balancers and block storage (free for early access).

If we compare prices between DigitalOcean and Scaleway, Scaleway is a clear winner. Prices of load balancer are 10€ and 8,99€ respectively, which is just a slight difference, but prices of instances are also on the Scaleway’s side and you may experience much bigger savings if you choose Scaleway. However, DigitalOcean has more data centers accross Europe and USA and also more experience running managed Kubernetes, so decision is not that easy, but if you are based in France, you should give Scaleway a try.

Hetzner Cloud still remains unbeatable with instance prices at half of Scaleway ones. Yes, this is not managed Kubernetes and there are no load balancers at the moment, but at least Hetzner introduced private networking so that nodes in your cluster finally may communicate over a private network and without solutions like WireGuard. You can find instructions how to setup private network at Hetzner Cloud here. And don’t forget Hetzner Cloud Controller Manager and Container Storage Interface driver.