Scaleway Object Storage

What Scaleway Object Storage actually is

Scaleway Object Storage is an S3-compatible object store operated by Scaleway S.A.S. (iliad group, France) from European datacenters. Any Amazon S3 client works against it — aws-cli, s3cmd, minio-cli — and the feature set tracks the S3 vocabulary closely: buckets, object versioning, object lock, lifecycle rules, IAM and bucket policies. What separates it from bolting storage onto a US hyperscaler is the jurisdiction story (French and EU law, no CLOUD Act exposure, HDS certification for health data) and a pricing model with no request fees.

Three storage classes cover the range. Standard Multi-AZ replicates data across three availability zones inside a region and is the class to pick for anything you care about. Standard One Zone spreads data across three racks within a single datacenter — cheaper, positioned for secondary backups and recreatable data. Glacier is the archive tier, restore-before-use, available only in the Paris and Amsterdam regions. Durability is quoted at 99.999999999% (eleven nines) with erasure coding, and the Standard Multi-AZ class carries a 99.9% availability SLA — numbers that are published on the product page rather than buried in a contract.

Regions are Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. Multi-AZ is the standout: storing across three independent zones is offered in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw, and inter-regional traffic between those regions is free of charge. For a European team replicating between two EU sites, that is a genuinely useful line item to have at zero.

Pricing: what you really pay

The published Paris rates, before tax, per the official storage pricing page: Standard Multi-AZ at €0.000022/GB/hour (about €0.01606/GB/month), Standard One Zone at €0.000011/GB/hour (about €0.00803/GB/month), and Glacier at €0.0000035/GB/hour (about €0.00254/GB/month). Requests are included — no per-API-call metering at all — and ingress is included. That "no request fees" policy is the pricing feature we like most, because request-heavy workloads on AWS S3 can see the request line rival the storage line.

Egress is metered but with a real allowance: 75GB of outgoing transfer free every month, then €0.01/GB. That covers external egress and inter-region transfers (Paris↔Amsterdam, Amsterdam↔Warsaw, Paris↔Warsaw); intra-regional transfer is free. Restoring from Glacier costs €0.009/GB. Bucket websites are free.

New accounts get two introductory allowances: 75GB of storage and 75GB of egress free every month on an ongoing basis, and a 90-day trial with 750GB of free storage across the Standard Multi-AZ and One Zone classes (split as you like between them; only the excess bills). The tagline "from €0.01/GB" is roughly the Standard One Zone reality at €0.008/GB/month, so the marketing rounds in the customer's favour — an unusual direction.

Two billing quirks deserve flagging. The docs state plainly that a billable unit started is due: storing 1KB for one second bills as one GB-hour. Small, numerous objects with frequent churn can cost more than the raw byte count suggests — pack small files into archives where possible. And Scaleway explicitly prices unauthorised cryptocurrency farming (Chia) on the platform at €0.08/GB, a policy line we found refreshingly direct.

Performance & infrastructure

We have not benchmarked this service — our dated fio and iperf3 runs cover VPS providers, not object stores — so treat performance as documentation-based. The backend runs on NVMe SSD, SSD and HDD depending on class, with network egress capacity quoted up to 100Gb/s, and Scaleway positions the architecture for petabyte-scale datasets and billions of objects. In practice, S3-compatible stores at this tier are fast enough for backups, media serving, data lakes and static assets; latency-sensitive application data belongs on Block Storage instead.

Data protection is the strong suit: eleven-nines durability via erasure coding, Multi-AZ placement that survives a full datacenter loss, encryption via SSE-C, SSE-KMS and Scaleway's object-native encryption (SSE-ONE), object lock and versioning (up to 1,000 versions per object — beyond that, new versions may fail or slow down, per the FAQ). Lifecycle rules move objects to Glacier and expire them automatically, which matters for FinOps more than any headline rate.

Operational surface: console UI with some deliberate limits (batch deletion caps at 1,000 objects), full CLI/API/Terraform coverage, Observability dashboard for monitoring, and integrations with backup tooling such as Veeam and ATEMPO advertised for disaster-recovery workflows. The docs are complete and honest about limitations, which we count as part of reliability: knowing the 1,000-version cap and the console batch limit before you design a pipeline is worth more than a glossy uptime claim.

On migration and interoperability, the S3 compatibility is broad enough that most tools work unchanged: point the endpoint at Scaleway, supply keys, and s3cmd or the AWS CLI behave normally. Third-party trackers that verify S3 providers list it as fully compatible with the standard client set, and backup vendors are explicitly supported. The practical friction is class semantics rather than API verbs — lifecycle transitions, restore flows from Glacier and the One Zone to Multi-AZ bucket migration rules are Scaleway-specific enough that reading the FAQ first saves an afternoon.

Where it falls short

The class and region matrix is narrower than AWS. Glacier exists only in Paris and Amsterdam; Milan is newer and its Multi-AZ story is still maturing; and there are no regions outside Europe at all — fine for EU workloads, a problem if your users are in APAC or the Americas and you wanted one global store.

Egress economics are the second watch item. 75GB free per month is generous for a small site and trivial for a media business; past it, €0.01/GB is billed on external and inter-region transfers, and unlike instance traffic it does not go to zero. CDN-front your hot assets rather than serving them directly from buckets.

The API compatibility is "S3-compatible", not "S3-identical": occasional gaps show up in tooling that probes edge features (the versioning cap, console batch limits, class-transition rules between One Zone and Multi-AZ buckets). Migrating between classes when Multi-AZ launches in a region means creating a new bucket and moving objects, which the FAQ describes plainly — migration is your job. And as with the rest of Scaleway, support is ticket-based; there is no per-bucket SLA escalation path beyond the 99.9% commitment with service credits.

Security and compliance are handled at a level small providers rarely match. IAM policies and bucket policies govern access, three encryption modes cover both customer-managed and platform-managed keys, object lock gives you WORM semantics for retention requirements, and the certifications (ISO 27001 for the platform, HDS for French health data) are the paperwork European compliance teams ask for by name. Combined with the published PUE history of the underlying datacenters, the operational story is unusually legible for a storage service.

Who should pick this

Our pick for European businesses that need S3-compatible storage inside the EU with predictable invoices: backups (especially with lifecycle-to-Glacier), static asset and media storage, data lakes for analytics, and secondary copies for disaster recovery. The combination of Multi-AZ in three regions, free inter-region transfer between them, no request fees and HDS certification makes it a natural fit for French and EU healthcare, public sector and GDPR-sensitive workloads — and it is one of the few S3-compatible stores that can claim jurisdictional immunity from US extraterritorial law outright.

It is also the right default for anyone already on Scaleway compute: intra-regional transfer to Instances is free, Kapsule workloads reach it over the private path, and the Terraform provider covers both sides. Teams comparing with AWS S3, OVHcloud or Backblaze-style stores should model their specific egress and request mix — for request-heavy or read-heavy patterns the no-request-fee model often wins even when the per-GB rate is comparable.

We would not pick it for global audiences needing edge regions, for workloads requiring more than 1,000 object versions, or for buyers who want phone support and enterprise escalation by default.

Key takeaways

• S3-compatible object storage from Scaleway (iliad, France) in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan — entirely under EU jurisdiction, HDS-certified.
• Three classes: Standard Multi-AZ (€0.01606/GB/month, 3 zones), Standard One Zone (€0.00803/GB/month), Glacier (~€0.00254/GB/month, Paris and Amsterdam only).
• No request fees, free ingress, 75GB storage and 75GB egress free every month, plus a 90-day 750GB trial for new accounts.
• Egress after the allowance is €0.01/GB including inter-region transfers; intra-regional transfer and transfer between Paris/Amsterdam/Warsaw is free.
• Durability quoted at 11 nines with 99.9% availability SLA on Standard Multi-AZ; encryption (SSE-C, SSE-KMS, SSE-ONE), object lock, versioning and lifecycle rules included.
• Watch the quirks: 1KB-for-1-second bills as a GB-hour, versioning caps at 1,000 per object, and Glacier restores cost €0.009/GB.

Sources

• https://www.scaleway.com/en/object-storage/
• https://scaleway.com/en/pricing/storage
• https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/object-storage/faq/
• https://scaleway.com/en/docs/faq/objectstorage
• https://scaleway.com/en/try-object-storage
• https://s3providers.com/providers/scaleway
• https://svpremium.dev/object-storage/scaleway
• https://scaleway.com/en/docs/account/reference-content/products-availability
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleway