“Let’s be clear: our goal is to disrupt the cloud computing industry.
In 2013 we built the C1 server, a BareMetal ARMv7 server designed for horizontally scalable workloads, when nobody thought ARM would be able to enter the server market. This proved to be huge success and we ran out of nodes in a few month.”  
https://blog.online.net/2017/04/27/scaleway-disruptive-armv8-cloud-servers/

I find this rather amusing. Disrupting the cloud computing industry with kit. Sure it’s ARM and it’s a different architecture from what we see in other public cloud providers, but’s a physical change. It’s not a disruption or even a game changer.

Disruption happens in a lot of different ways. The Innovators Dilemma talks about that and is best portrait in this diagram:

ARM is great for high power efficiency, whilst maintaining processing speed – it’s a known solution -, but we develop against x86 architectures and we need to refactor that on development – customers know that. So the market reach is a huge ladder – predictable, whereas other public cloud providers -not yet a traditional market – have already everything ready for a game change: moving kit to a new cpu architecture.

Disruption: is a change within your current market with a new technology., lowering costs whilst improving performance. When you have to build your own market it’s simply called innovation. Nice try Scaleway.