Managed Kubernetes on OVHcloud vs Scaleway: a first look for web app teams

If you’re running web applications on European infrastructure and want a managed Kubernetes cluster without operating the control plane yourself, OVHcloud and Scaleway are two of the most credible options. Both are French-headquartered, both keep your data inside Europe, and both run CNCF-certified Kubernetes. The interesting differences show up once you look at how the control plane is sold, how nodes and storage behave, and how each one fits into the rest of the provider’s ecosystem.

This is a first look at both from the perspective of a team deploying and scaling a real web application, not a benchmark. We’ve grouped the comparison around three things that actually matter day to day: how easy each is to get running, what the feature set covers, and how cleanly each integrates with the components a web app needs – load balancers, storage, registries, and databases.

How the control plane is sold

This is the clearest structural difference between the two, and it shapes everything downstream.

OVHcloud’s Managed Kubernetes Service (MKS) offers two plans. The Free plan gives you a managed control plane at no charge – you only pay for the worker nodes, load balancers, and storage you attach. It supports up to 100 nodes, a 400 MB etcd, and a single availability zone. The Standard plan is a paid tier that adds a dedicated etcd of up to 8 GB, support for up to 500 nodes, floating IPs per node, cross-AZ resilience, and a production SLA of 99.9% for single-AZ or 99.99% for 3-AZ deployments. The headline is simple: you can run a managed OVHcloud cluster and pay only for compute.

Scaleway’s Kubernetes Kapsule takes a tiered approach to the control plane itself. The Mutualized (shared) control plane uses up to 4 GB of memory, one resilient API server replica, a three-replica etcd across availability zones, an etcd cap of 55 MB, and a ceiling of 150 nodes. It carries no SLA. Above that sit three Dedicated control planes – Dedicated 4, 8, and 16 – which give you 4, 8, or 16 GB of dedicated RAM, two API server replicas for high availability, a 200 MB etcd, audit logs, a 99.5% uptime SLA, and up to 250 to 500 nodes depending on tier. Dedicated control planes come with a 30-day commitment, and upgrading resets that window.

The practical takeaway: for a small or early-stage web app, OVHcloud’s free control plane is hard to argue with on cost. For a larger application where the control plane needs guaranteed resources, audit logging, and an SLA, both providers offer a dedicated path – OVHcloud through its Standard plan, Scaleway through its Dedicated control planes. Watch the etcd limits. Scaleway’s 55 MB cap on the shared plane is genuinely small for clusters with many custom resources or frequent object churn, and it’s a reason to move to a dedicated plane sooner than node count alone would suggest.

Getting a cluster running

Both providers get you from zero to a running cluster quickly through a web console, a CLI, an API, and Terraform. Neither requires you to touch the control plane components – etcd, the API server, the scheduler, and the controller manager are all operated by the provider.

Scaleway leans into one-click convenience. Its Application Library lets you install Helm charts directly from the console, and it advertises scaling to 500 nodes from a single action. Autohealing is built in: if a node stays unresponsive for more than 15 minutes, Kapsule restarts or replaces it. There’s also Kosmos, a multi-cloud variant that lets you attach nodes from other providers or on-premises machines to a Scaleway-managed control plane, which is unusual and useful if you’re running hybrid.

OVHcloud’s MKS is also fully managed, with auto-scaling and auto-healing. One thing to know up front: you get no SSH access to nodes. OS and component updates are handled by OVHcloud, and node-level debugging is done through kubectl debug rather than logging into the host. Upgrades and patches use an in-place procedure where nodes are reinstalled one at a time, and any drain respects Pod Disruption Budgets for up to 10 minutes before a forced drain. If you run a web app with proper PDBs and readiness probes, this is exactly the behaviour you want.

For a team that already manages infrastructure as code, the experience converges. You’ll define the cluster and node pools in Terraform, wire up your CI/CD pipeline, and deploy with Helm regardless of which provider you pick. The console differences matter most for the first hour and for occasional manual operations.

Nodes, scaling, and storage

Both platforms support node pools, horizontal cluster auto-scaling, and a mix of CPU and GPU instance types. The differences are in the details.

On OVHcloud, worker nodes are standard Public Cloud instances that appear in your project, and the cluster’s quota is tied to your project quota. The default limit is 110 pods per node, but OVHcloud’s own management components (CNI, Konnectivity, agents) consume some of that budget, so plan your resource requests carefully to avoid OOMKilled pods on overloaded nodes. Persistent storage is provided through Cinder via the CSI driver, with block storage classes including high-speed and gen2 options. A single block volume attaches to one node, and a node can hold up to 100 Cinder volumes. OVHcloud also supports LUKS-encrypted volumes using OVHcloud Managed Keys, and zone-specific storage classes for 3-AZ clusters. A Kubernetes service of type LoadBalancer provisions a Public Cloud Load Balancer built on OpenStack Octavia, and the load balancer’s lifecycle is tied to the Kubernetes resource.

Scaleway provides block volumes, load balancers, and a private container registry, all integrated with Kapsule. Networking can run inside a VPC so pods and nodes communicate over a private network, which improves both isolation and performance. Like OVHcloud, scaling is both horizontal and vertical based on your node pool configuration, and the cloud controller manager and autoscaler are managed for you.

For a typical web app, the storage story on both comes down to the same advice: keep persistent data on persistent volumes backed by block or file storage, not on the node’s local disk. Nodes get reinstalled during upgrades and replaced during auto-healing, so anything stored locally is disposable by design.

Ecosystem integration for a web application

A Kubernetes cluster is only as useful as the services around it. This is where the choice often gets decided, because a web app needs a database, object storage, a CDN, a registry, and secrets management close to the cluster.

OVHcloud’s MKS integrates natively with the rest of its Public Cloud: managed databases, object storage, a managed private registry, load balancers, and a range of CPU and GPU instances. If you’re already on OVHcloud for compute or storage, the cluster slots in without adding a new vendor relationship.

Scaleway offers a comparably broad portfolio – VPC, public gateways, block volumes, load balancers, container registry, a secret manager, and GPUs – plus managed databases and object storage elsewhere in its catalogue. Its console-driven Application Library and Helm integration make it quick to stand up supporting services for a proof of concept.

In practice, both cover the core building blocks a medium-to-large web application needs. The decision usually rests on which provider you already use for the rest of your stack, regional availability for your users, and how the managed database and object storage offerings compare for your specific workload. We’d recommend testing the database latency and object storage throughput from inside a cluster pod before committing, since those numbers vary by region and matter more than the cluster spec sheet.

Sovereignty and compliance

Both providers keep workloads and data within the EU and market themselves on European data sovereignty, which is a large part of why platform teams evaluate them as replacements for hyperscaler components. For a web app handling personal data, that maps directly onto GDPR obligations and reduces the Schrems II exposure that comes with US-controlled infrastructure. If your compliance posture depends on data staying in Europe and on contracts governed by EU law, both OVHcloud and Scaleway give you a cleaner story than running the same workload on a US hyperscaler region.

For production readiness, the dedicated control plane tiers matter here too. Scaleway’s Dedicated planes enable audit logs and a 99.5% SLA; OVHcloud’s Standard plan brings dedicated etcd, cross-AZ resilience, and a 99.9% to 99.99% SLA. Audit logging and a contractual SLA are usually non-negotiable once an application is handling real user data, so budget for the dedicated tier in any serious production design rather than running long-term on a free or shared control plane.

Which one fits

For a small team or an early-stage product, OVHcloud’s free control plane is the easier place to start – you pay only for nodes and the services you attach, and you can move to the Standard plan when you need an SLA and dedicated etcd. Scaleway is attractive when you want fast console-driven setup, a VPC-native network, the Application Library for quick installs, or the Kosmos option for attaching nodes from outside Scaleway.

Whichever you choose, the portable parts of your stack stay the same. Helm for packaging, cert-manager for certificates, Ingress-NGINX for routing, and Prometheus for monitoring all run identically on both, which keeps your architecture provider-agnostic and your exit cost low. That portability is the point: pick the European platform that fits your current stack and budget, and keep the application layer neutral so the decision stays reversible.

At ADM Cloudtech we design and operate exactly these kinds of clusters on European infrastructure, with automation, 24/7 monitoring, and DevOps support built around high fault tolerance and availability. If you’re weighing OVHcloud against Scaleway for a production web application, we can help you run a structured comparison against your own workload rather than a spec sheet.