Aruba Cloud in 2026: an honest review for teams leaving AWS or Azure

Aruba S.p.A., of Ponte San Pietro near Bergamo, is best known in Italy for domains, web hosting, PEC certified email and digital signatures. This review covers none of those. It is about Aruba Cloud for developers: the Cloud Management Platform (CMP), Aruba's newer API-driven platform, and the older Cloud Server and Cloud VPS lines. Compute is cheap, traffic out of virtual machines is free, and the data centres are Aruba's own, with Rated-4 certificates in Italy: our starter workload costs EUR 24.67 a month. The weak points are the catalogue and the transparency around it: no managed PostgreSQL, no load balancer for VMs on the CMP, a MySQL service capped at 100 GB with no documented high availability, every managed service in one region, no public status page, one generic SLA and no support response times.

This article is one of a series comparing 24 European cloud providers with AWS and Azure; the overview puts them side by side. Everything below was checked on 15 and 16 October 2026 against Aruba's documentation, contract terms, price pages, certificates, the Italian cybersecurity agency's catalogue, regulatory filings and user reports, each at its source. We did not open an account or run workloads.

At a glance

What you can build

Aruba Cloud is two platforms under one brand, with separate consoles. The CMP is the part comparable with AWS or Azure, and it exists in one region, ITBG-Bergamo. The classic line (OpenStack Cloud Server, formerly "Cloud PRO", VMware Cloud Server and Cloud VPS) sells fixed-size servers in eight data centres. Object Storage is separate again, in seven.

Missing outright: managed PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, OpenSearch, functions, queues, a CDN and a secrets manager. Identity is projects and API client credentials, with no role or permission model found. DDoS protection is not sold as a product. Object Storage says it "fully supports the S3 protocol" but publishes no list of what it leaves out; versioning, lifecycle rules and bucket policies are not documented.

The CMP's tooling is new and Aruba's own: a Terraform and OpenTofu provider (1.0.0 on 22 July, 1.1.1 on 7 September 2026) with 25 resource types but none for a load balancer or object storage, a Go SDK, a CLI, a Crossplane provider, and API documentation first published on 16 May 2026, whose metadata page still lists Kubernetes 1.31 to 1.33. The classic line has no current Terraform provider; its old SDKs were archived in 2018 and 2019.

What it costs

Aruba Cloud list prices in EUR, VAT excluded, from its price pages, checked 15 and 16 October 2026, in Bergamo (ITBG, data centre IT3) at 730 hours a month. Frankfurt (DE1), a partner site with no managed database or Kubernetes, appears as a variant.

Workload A, a starter setup: one VM with 2 vCPU and 4 GB, a 40 GB disk, one IPv4 address, 1 TB of egress and 100 GB of object storage.

AWS charges EUR 112.37 and Azure EUR 116.15 for the same in Frankfurt, so the CMP costs 22% of AWS; on AWS the 1 TB of egress alone is USD 81.00 of a USD 125.95 bill. As a Cloud VPS (OpenStack VPS O2A4 with 40 GB, 25 TB of traffic and an IPv4 address included), the total is EUR 8.33, billed monthly, with no Terraform. In Frankfurt, on a classic OpenStack Cloud Server (if Frankfurt sells that type, which is not confirmed), the workload comes to EUR 23.21, or EUR 26.86 if its IPv4 is charged, on which Aruba's own pages disagree.

Workload B, a small production system: three VMs of 4 vCPU and 16 GB with an IPv4 address each, 300 GB of SSD block storage, a load balancer, PostgreSQL with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 100 GB as primary plus standby, 1 TB of object storage with 1 million PUT and 10 million GET requests, a Kubernetes control plane and 2 TB of egress.

Aruba does not say whether the VDC's vCPUs are shared or dedicated, and sells no size labelled dedicated. With the standard Kubernetes control plane, which has no listed charge, the total is EUR 231.41; block storage replicated across three zones adds EUR 6.57. The HA control plane's page says 0.05 an hour but "36.00 per month"; we used 730 hours.

AWS charges EUR 1,082.61 for workload B on m7i.xlarge and Azure EUR 1,091.88 on D4s_v5. A percentage would flatter Aruba, because its total leaves out the parts that cost most to run well. The line items show where the gap is real: AWS bills the 2 TB of egress at USD 171.00 and its HA PostgreSQL at USD 320.13 with storage, where Aruba charges nothing for the egress and EUR 40.15 for a single MySQL instance with its storage. The HA Kubernetes control plane, EUR 36.50, is a little over half the EUR 65.13 of EKS.

In Frankfurt, the classic VMware Cloud Server is the only classic VM the classic load balancer can serve: three VMs, disks, IPv4 addresses, the load balancer and object storage come to EUR 385.59, with no managed database or Kubernetes available there.

Egress and IPv4. VDC Cloud Servers have "unlimited and included traffic" on a "network card 1 Gb/s flat", and we found no fair-use clause in the terms or the acceptable use policy; the port is the practical ceiling. Object Storage is the exception: EUR 0.50 per 10 GB, so EUR 50 per TB, against EUR 80.30 per TB on AWS beyond its free 100 GB. Its packages bundle egress at ten times their storage (4 TB with 40 TB of egress for EUR 60.00 a month). An IPv4 address costs EUR 3.65 a month, the same number AWS and Azure charge in dollars.

Billing. Aruba Cloud is prepaid: you top up credit, and hourly, monthly or yearly charges are deducted from it. "The Customer may use the Service after the amount paid has been collected by Aruba", so a bank transfer delays the start by about three working days; card and PayPal are immediate. The credit is a hard spending cap. The other side of the cap: when credit runs out, cloud servers are switched off for days 0 to 7, switched off or archived for days 8 to 17, and deleted after 17 days; Kubernetes clusters, Object Storage, Block Storage, Elastic IPs and the VPC follow the same timetable. We found no free trial.

GPUs are billed monthly only: an L40S costs EUR 1,979.90 a month, EUR 2.71 per GPU-hour by our division, against EUR 2.08 on AWS in Frankfurt.

Price changes. Archived price pages show two Cloud VPS sizes rising between 10 September and 2 November 2025, with no announcement found: the OpenStack VPS O8A16 from EUR 18.19 to 19.89 a month (+9.3%) and the O16A32 from EUR 31.29 to 38.90 (+24.3%). The two smaller sizes did not change. VMware Cloud VPS left the price page in November 2025; we found no notice to existing customers. CMP prices did not change between 13 January and 16 October 2026; earlier ones could not be compared, because the current price pages first appear in the Wayback Machine in January 2026. The terms let Aruba change prices with 30 days' notice, citing for example "the increase in the costs of electricity", with a right to withdraw.

Reliability

What a zone is. Aruba's definition is strict: "Zones do not share physical infrastructure, such as Data Centers, servers, network devices, etc. and are therefore not affected by failures occurring in other Zones in the Region." Its knowledge base lists all three Bergamo zones under the single IT3 campus in Ponte San Pietro. Aruba's ANSI/TIA-942 certificates name three buildings there, Data Center A, B and C. That these three buildings are the three zones is plausible, but Aruba does not say so, and we found nothing on how far apart they are. The CMP has no second region, so a design that must survive the loss of the Bergamo campus cannot stay on Aruba's managed services.

What spans the zones. Block Storage can be "Regional", with "synchronous copies of the volume across three different zones". The HA Kubernetes control plane replicates "across 3 availability zones" and, "once enabled, it cannot be disabled". The DBaaS does not: you pick its zone at creation and cannot change it, and no standby, replica or failover is documented. The product page promises "a 99.98% guaranteed SLA" and the Terraform documentation calls it "a managed, highly available database cluster"; neither says how, and the legal SLA has no DBaaS figure. We record no documented HA.

The SLA. One document, version 1.3 in force since 31 July 2025, covers every Aruba Cloud service:

• The credit reads as at most 20 steps of 5%, so up to 100% of the affected resources' last 30 days, paid as panel credit. Resources accrue no charges while down.
• The measurement is annual, so the first 0.05% of a year (about 4.4 hours) earns nothing, and "Only the faults confirmed by the monitoring system of Aruba will be taken into consideration".
• Excluded: "extraordinary interventions to be carried out urgently at the unquestionable judgement of Aruba", notified "even less than 48 hours" ahead. Scheduled maintenance, announced 48 hours ahead, does not count.
• The terms cap liability at "the amount paid by the Customer for the specific Service affected in the 12 months preceding the breach", and Aruba "does not make backups of the data and contents entered by the Customer" unless ordered.
• Aruba may change the SLA "at any time"; the customer may then withdraw within 30 days.

AWS commits to 99.99% for EC2 across two or more zones, with claims until the end of the second billing cycle; Azure gives 99.99% across zones and 60 days to claim. Aruba's 99.95% is annual, its own monitoring decides what counts, and ten days is a short window.

Status page and incidents. Aruba Cloud has no public status page: the obvious addresses gave no response or a 404 on 16 October 2026. We found no incident involving a whole Aruba Cloud data centre or the Bergamo region from October 2024 to October 2026, but without a status page that absence is weak evidence. The Aruba outage readers may remember, about two hours of webmail and PEC failures on 28 September 2026 (Punto Informatico), was not reported to affect the cloud.

The landmark older incident is the fire in the UPS battery cabinets in Arezzo on 29 April 2011, which cut power for about 11 hours without damaging customer data; Aruba then replaced every UPS and moved the batteries out of the data halls (01net, May 2011).

Support

There is one support tier, included: "TECHNICAL SUPPORT 24/7 service" by ticket. No paid plan for Aruba Cloud is on the price pages; the only paid help listed is a consulting service at EUR 50.00 an hour, and larger customers are steered to Aruba Enterprise, the consulting division. Neither the SLA nor the terms give a first-response or resolution time: assistance "is provided at the times and in the ways indicated on the site".

Aruba says "Our support service operates from Italy". The site, panel and knowledge base exist in eight languages, English and Italian among them; which languages the desk answers in is not stated. There is no official forum; Aruba developers answer GitHub issues on the Terraform provider.

AWS Basic opens no technical cases and Azure Basic has no technical response targets, so Aruba's included support gives more. But a one-hour target for a production outage can be bought on both (AWS Business Support+ from USD 29 a month or 9% of spend, Azure Standard at USD 100 a month), and at Aruba it cannot be bought at all.

Getting an account

Signing up takes two identities. First an Aruba account, created as a private individual, company, freelancer or public administration; then a Cloud account (an ID such as ARU-12345) whose password "is valid for six months". The classic services open in a separate control panel from inside the CMP. Nothing runs until prepaid credit has been collected.

No routine ID or video check at signup is documented. The terms let Aruba "verify this information and request, if necessary, additional documents or information", and suspend the service of a customer who hides "his/her real identity".

The documented limits: 30 classic VMs per Cloud account, 5 Kubernetes clusters per region, node pools of at most 6 nodes, and 100 GB per DBaaS instance. CMP quotas for vCPUs or memory are not published. Workload B on day one: probably yes for the parts that exist; nothing published blocks it, but no document confirms it. On AWS the default of 5 vCPUs for standard instances is below workload B's 12; Azure's 20 cores per region fit on paper.

Two clauses matter later. Aruba "may suspend the Service at its own discretion and without prior notice" for reasons that include breach, security and a court request, and also when "the Customer is involved, in any capacity whatsoever, in any judicial or extrajudicial dispute of any nature whatsoever concerning acts and conduct performed through or relating to the Service"; during a suspension "the Customer shall not be able to access data". And under the acceptable use policy, if your public IPs land on a blacklist such as Spamhaus's, Aruba may suspend or terminate the service "regardless of whether the IPs have been reported/blacklisted due to a cause attributable to the customer".

Compliance and data protection

Certificates belong to Aruba S.p.A. as a whole, and every certified site is in Italy.

Italian public sector. In the catalogue of ACN, Italy's national cybersecurity agency, the developer-facing CMP services are qualified at level 1, ordinary data: the VDC (to November 2028), Managed Kubernetes (to June 2028), DBaaS and Object Storage (to January 2028). Level 3, which admits "strategic" public data, belongs to the VMware-based Virtual Private Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud, qualified QC3 on 19 December 2024. Aruba announced the QI3 qualification of its infrastructure on 4 June 2024; we did not find that card in the catalogue.

Data protection. The processing agreement is built into the terms: audits need at least 20 days' notice, and the sub-processor list is given on request, not published, with changes notified 30 days ahead and a right to withdraw. The one named sub-processor is Virtuozzo International GmbH for the Application Platform, which may access data from third countries without an adequacy decision, under standard contractual clauses. Whether the operators of the partner data centres are sub-processors is not stated. The customer picks the region. The contract is written in Italian, which prevails over translations, under Italian law, with the Court of Bergamo for business customers.

Who controls it

Aruba S.p.A., founded in 1994, is a private joint-stock company, not listed. The most recent public filing we found, its statement to Consob of 16 November 2017, names Giorgio Cecconi as beneficial owner; the current shareholder register was not seen. In a 2019 Forbes Italia piece published in the sponsored BrandVoice section, so in effect Aruba speaking, the company said it had not sought outside investors. We found no outside investor and no non-European shareholder, which is absence of evidence, not proof. Revenue for the S.p.A. alone was EUR 349.5 million in 2025, according to ReportAziende, a re-publisher of filed accounts.

The group also includes Aruba PEC, the certification authority Actalis and the Czech hosting company FORPSI, which sells the Aruba Cloud brand in Poland and Hungary; a customer signing up through those sites may contract with FORPSI rather than Aruba S.p.A., which we could not confirm.

The data centres in Italy and the Czech Republic are Aruba's own. Paris, Frankfurt, London and Warsaw are partner facilities whose operators are not named. The CMP runs on OpenStack, the classic servers on OpenStack or VMware, and the Application Platform is licensed from Virtuozzo, which "at any time and without any reason may interrupt the supply of the Service".

Leaving

Data leaves VMs for free; exporting 10 TB straight from Object Storage on pay per use costs EUR 500. The open interfaces help: S3-compatible object storage, CNCF-conformant Kubernetes, MySQL 8.0 with a backup download link in the API, and OpenStack VMs. The lock-in sits in the prepaid account model, VMware and Hyper-V images on the classic line, the Application Platform, SQL Server licences rented by the vCPU, and the CMP's own API: no OpenStack API is exposed to customers, as far as the documentation shows.

The exit terms are good on paper. A Data Act clause gives a right to migrate to another provider with 30 days' notice, during which access is kept; Aruba deletes the data 30 days after the notice period ends, and "undertakes not to hinder, limit or make it more costly for the Customer to use equivalent services provided by third-party providers". Unused prepaid credit is refunded on termination. Worse terms come with 30 days' notice and a right to withdraw. A transfer that Aruba carries out for you is "subject to a specific quotation".

What users report

Developer evidence is almost absent in English. Since October 2023 Hacker News has one substantive comment on Aruba Cloud (41355379, August 2024: "quality/price ratio worst than Hetzener I think"), Reddit threads are mostly older and about the former EUR 1 VPS, and the CMP, launched between 2023 and 2025, has almost no public footprint yet.

One theme reached two reports, and only from a review site: the account structure. Reviewers on Trustpilot describe "3 different registrations" (February 2024) and complain about the console (February and December 2025). Aruba's own documents confirm the structure, an Aruba account plus a Cloud account with a six-month password and a separate panel for the classic services; the complaints about the console's speed and design we could not confirm. Expect to find answers in the knowledge base and from support, not on forums.

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Aruba Cloud suits Italian companies and public bodies that want their data in owned, Rated-4 Italian data centres, with ACN qualifications for the products they buy; VM-centred or Kubernetes workloads that send a lot of traffic out; applications built on MySQL or SQL Server; and small projects on a Cloud VPS for a few euros a month.

Look elsewhere if you need managed PostgreSQL, a database standby, a load balancer in front of CMP VMs, or managed services beyond VMs, Kubernetes and MySQL; if you need a second region or managed services in Germany; or if you need a public status page, a per-service SLA and contractual support times.

Sources

Checked on 15 and 16 October 2026.

Pricing

• Pricing overview
• Virtual Data Center prices, OpenStack Cloud Server prices, VMware Cloud Server prices, Managed Kubernetes prices, Block Storage prices, Object Storage prices, DBaaS prices
• Cloud VPS, GPU on Demand prices, bare metal prices
• Archived price pages: Cloud VPS, 10 September 2025, 2 November 2025, VDC prices, 13 January 2026
• KB, what happens when credit runs out, KB, payment methods
• AWS and Azure figures: AWS Price List bulk API and Azure Retail Prices API, converted at the ECB rate of 15 October 2026

Terms and SLA

• Terms and Conditions, Cloud and Data Centre Services, v1.4, published 8 October 2026
• Service Level Agreement v1.3, effective 31 July 2025
• Aruba Services User Policy v2.3, 6 June 2024

Documentation

• KB, data center networks and services and the location of provision
• KB, VDC Cloud Server, Block Storage, Object Storage, creating a Kubernetes cluster, the DBaaS service, creating a DBaaS
• KB, CMP load balancer, classic load balancer, creating an OpenStack Cloud Server, the Cloud account, changelog
• API documentation and its changelog
• Terraform provider, Aruba Cloud on GitHub, CNCF conformance, v1.35

Status and incidents

• No public status page found (checked 16 October 2026)
• Punto Informatico, 28 September 2026
• 01net, 2 May 2011

Compliance

• Certifications; certificates for ISO 27001, CSA STAR, ISAE 3402 and ANSI/TIA-942
• ACN catalogue: VDC, Managed Kubernetes, DBaaS, Object Storage, Virtual Private Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud
• Aruba press releases: QI3, 4 June 2024, QC3, 19 December 2024

Company and ownership

• About us and Data Center Network
• Aruba statement to Consob, 16 November 2017
• Forbes Italia, 4 March 2019 (BrandVoice, sponsored)
• ReportAziende, Aruba S.p.A. (re-publisher of filed accounts)

User reports

• Hacker News comment 41355379 (August 2024)
• Trustpilot, arubacloud.com (review site, February 2024 to December 2025)