Accidentally came across the mention of hosting Scaleway .

Pros:

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

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

The first steps

Zaregalsya, fed them a card number. Everything is OK, I'm not worried.
')
Chose the OS. There are three versions of Ubuntu, two versions of Debian, and several other distributions. I chose Ubuntu 14.04 - what I know well.
Update: List of available operating systems: 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 the user MrFrizzy saw that they can have an instance from the docker image. You can use images from ImageHub or upload your own.

Started a new instance. Unlike, for example, Digital Ocean, you cannot make SSH by password, only by key. Immediately causes 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’s home folder. OK, God be with him.

But in the settings of the SSH daemon login password (parameter PasswordAuthentication) has been enabled ! What I think is pretty significant is the hole. Somehow it looks raw.

Ssh access to this instance is allowed for the root user, which I consider a minus, but not great. The same is done on Digital Ocean, but on AWS, the user is ubuntu, which is added to sudoers to perform all administrative functions without a password. This scheme seems to me 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. For me, fine.

Iron

What is the processor?


So, I have a 32 bit ARM v7 processor. About 4 cores - the true truth. 1332 bogomips ... well ... This is close to any Pentium III / 666. On the microinstance AWS, for example, 3591 mogomips, besides there is a 64 bit processor and OS.

That is, potentially, 4 * 1332 = 5328, it will be faster than the microinstants, even in the jump. AWS Microinstans, 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 for a short time. And then it will slow down. I do not have exact figures how much it will slow down, but subjective feelings - 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, actually 2 gigabytes, not deceived. Well, the core in memory takes a little less than I used to recently on x86-64 Linux.

Tests

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


To pump data in large chunks is not difficult. I reduce the block to 4k.


I think that ~ 100 MB is what I put into the 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 big. Not sure what the limitation of the disk is, perhaps, the restriction, again, the network interface. But in general, everything looks quite good.

Soft

And how to deploy your projects on it?

And let's try the docker ... Here I was disappointed. He says he only works on 64 bit systems. Although I have doubts that he can work at ARM at all. But, at least, he threw out a mistake to me, about 64 bits. In general, it disappears.
Update3: Thanks to everyone who wrote in the comments ( MrFrizzy , alexac , WGH ). In fact, you cannot install a docker in the way recommended by the docker: docs.docker.com/linux/step_one. From the Ubuntu repositories it is set nomralno, but version 1.4 is there, which is not applicable. But you can use the 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 put everything myself ...

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

Oracle java8 for the ARM processor from the repository webupd8team / java is also set and earned. In fact, for current java projects, I do not need. But for the future to check, at least its presence was necessary.

findings

Cloud hosting on ARM processors exists! And from the first of September it is very cheap. Of course, I also want to drive a real site, under some 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 did not.