
Equinix is acquiring Packet - jacobwg
https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/
======
drej
A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my
business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal
projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the
13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs.

I guess my account got pwned.

They asked how I'd pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn't have a
valid card in their system (the previous one expired since I last used
Packet). I told them to stop the VMs and allow me to reset my credentials. I
also asked them to investigate their logs and geolocate all the users that
logged into my account. I was also curious they actually let someone log into
the account from a new IP (without notifying me) and also allowed them to run
instances without a valid card.

They blocked my account, which also blocked this support thread. So I started
a new thread from an alternative e-mail address to resolve the issues.

I never heard from them again.

~~~
ep103
My company moved to packet about two years ago, for about half of our cloud-
based server needs. We loved the pricing and figured it was worth a shot.

Over the last 2 years, we've had ~4 major outages on their platform. The last
of these was so severe we're moving everything back off and over to aws.

~~~
rakem
4 outages in 2 years isn't horrible.... AWS would have the same story, as
would basically any other hosting provider.

~~~
toast0
It really depends on what you consider a major outage. If we set the bar at at
events that would break customers using a single hosted location, 4 over two
years isn't horrible. Things in this category are fiber cuts, automatic
transfer switch failures and other power issues, PoP router mishaps, HVAC
failures, etc. Steps can be taken by the provider to reduce the occurrence of
these, but some will happen, and customers that care should build around it.

If we set the bar at events that break customers who have taken reasonable
steps to be geographically distributed, 4 over two years is horrible. Things
here are cascading router failure, BGP misconfiguration or external hijack,
major peering dispute, bad push to critical systems. If these aren't rare,
it's likely to be avoidable failures caused by the provider. Sometimes the
earlier types of problems hit here too --- fiber cuts between regional data
centers can be major problems if more things run on that fiber than expected;
it's always fun to learn redundant fiber is in the same bundle, and usually
that's learned when the bundle is cut.

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q3k
Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture
at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into
a closed-off enterprise-only product/service, especially in the IXP space.

~~~
hetspookjee
I didn't know how fast to turn around when I tried to register an account and
they insisted I needed to provide a copy of my passport or drivers license. I
don't know why I need to provide such information for a hosting provider as
I've never had to do so before at any of their competitors.

or perhaps you mean something else with open?

~~~
ianhawes
They obviously wanted to verify who you were which is why they requested a
government issued photo ID.

Good on them for being proactive about it instead of waiting until you had
created a server. Could you imagine a production server being frozen while
they wait for you to verify your identity?

Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud,
hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own
name.

~~~
ryanlol
> Fraud is incredibly prevalent in the hosting space. Spammers, CC fraud,
> hackers, etc.. all stand to benefit from servers not obtained in their own
> name.

All of those can get fake id scans for a couple of dollars each.

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Eikon
Packet’s offering are so good and so much above competition that it’s not even
funny.

I mean, why almost no one else is offering BGP ECMP, byoip, anycast routing, a
sane setup system among others. It boggles my mind.

It’s a hard sell going back to geoip and shitty layer2 switching that you get
everywhere else after using their services.

~~~
swyx
hi I'm a mere frontend developer who doesnt do much at the network layer - do
you mind ELIFEDing to me what exactly Packet got right? What's the big deal
about automated bare metal? is it somehow a lot faster? cheaper? than
virtualization? Is Packet 100% for edge computing or is Equinix kinda
repurposing it in this acquisition for its edge computing strategy?

I feel like something that is so obvious to you is not obvious to me and it'd
probably help other readers here to follow along. Thanks in advance

~~~
shaklee3
Here's the way I see it: there are a lot of customers who don't need all of
the AWS services. They also would prefer to be running on bare metal for
performance reasons, and to have slightly more control over their application.
I know AWS with the nitro instances are closing that gap, but packet was
around before they had those.

Also, their provisioning software is excellent. From the time you choose to
deploy, it takes only about 30 to 45 seconds for your instance to start. I
know AWS is faster, but AWS isn't installing a new operating system each time.
as the other posters pointed out, they have a lot of features that AWS will
also not let you do, like bgp with ecmp.

lastly, they tend to have newer types of instances that other providers don't
that you can play around on. The cavium arm processor comes to mind, which I
haven't seen on any of the major cloud providers.

~~~
swyx
ok awesome. minor follow up - why do customers care about the newer instances
like cavium arm processors? again is it a pure performance thing? or they are
extremely optimized for some kind of workload?

maybe i'm so used to OSes abstracting things that I completely lack knowledge
about what baremetal choices can do for me. this is a little scary.

~~~
shaklee3
I can't speak for everyone, but ARM processors may be cheaper for some types
of workloads. In terms of cores/$, they're cheaper, but some applications
would perform far worse on those than on x86. Others just want to use them as
a playground to test ideas without buying an ARM server.

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donalhunt
Packet's blog post: [https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-
processors/](https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/)

This is probably a good play for Equinix as it provides a lower barrier to
entry to a segment of the market that they typically haven't engaged (Packet
being largely profitable probably helps).

In addition, I believe Packet already had presence in a number of Equinix
datacenters so "landlord buys tenant" comes to mind...

~~~
shaklee3
How do you know they're profitable?

~~~
donalhunt
Assumption based on 1) their pricing model and 2) them being acquired by
Equinix (who I consider quite conservative).

~~~
shaklee3
I believe their pricing model was cheaper than any of the major cloud
providers for an equivalent compute and networking resources. Given that their
margins are also lower due to the volumes, I wouldn't think that it's obvious
that they were profitable just by their pricing model.

~~~
qaq
Their control plane is more simple

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pm90
I was hoping for Packet to be the next big bare metal provider so this is
kinda sad at first glance. I’ve heard great things about them but haven’t used
them; I was considering them for a side project of spinning up my own k8s
cluster just because.

GCP and AWS probably fit the needs of most established businesses. I know
quite a few startups that use bare metals though since they cost a lot less.
Plus, you have complete visibility and control over your entire stack.

I hope others spring up to address the market of users needing extremely
highly customized systems at the lowest costs.

~~~
dilyevsky
Packet’s pricing doesn’t seem worth it to me compared to GCP - looking at
their list prices they seem to be priced just 20% less for compute (actually
same if you get e2s) so unless I’m missing something seems like very niche
offering...

~~~
erichocean
GCP will literally shut off your servers, with email support only, and f*ck
you. Happened to me right after I'd done a multi-million job for Nike the
weekend before. No recourse, nothing. Just "we think this is fraud so we're
shutting you down, here's a noreply email to contact us".

I wouldn't consider using GCP for anything I cared about. AWFUL customer
service.

~~~
dilyevsky
Don’t put production account on cc

Edit: also gcp is just one example. DO has virtually same price tag

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mmmBacon
I wonder what the purchase price was. According to TechCrunch, Packet was
valued at $100M and had raised $36M.
[https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-
bare-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-
cloud-provider-packet/)

~~~
Hydraulix989
With liquidation preferences, it would have to be at least $36M before the
investors are fully repaid and the founders start seeing a single cent.

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shaklee3
It seems they are in the process of open sourcing their deployment software.
Does anyone know how this affects that? The github repos are still empty.

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walrus01
Packet has to be the most impossible to google company name ever. Unless you
google "packet + bare metal" or something.

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ablekh
_" When the transaction closes later this quarter, Packet will continue
operating as before: same team, same platform, same vision. Our commitment to
our customers ..."_ \-- The question is _how long_ before Equinix decides to
change the _status quo_.

I'm seeing it as yet another (after recent news on Visa's Plaid acquisition)
blow to diversification and competition in the cloud and technology
ecosystems. Generally, industry consolidation is IMO a scary thing ...

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senderista
This is sad news. I used Packet for a benchmarking project
([https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-
benchmarks](https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks)) and was super
impressed by the ease of use. Put EC2 absolutely to shame (and was much
cheaper than EC2’s bare metal offering).

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lovebigmacs
I'm not sure that very many people understood what sort of spot pricing Packet
had. I have rented _so many_ hours of EPYC server time for $.25/hr in SJC1. Or
a 96 core ARM machine for $.30/hr in Amsterdam.

I had good luck with them and they were always responsive in their Slack. I
was sad to see the news, anyway.

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ksec
So Equinx is stepping into Cloud Hosting?

What makes Packet any difference to, Linode, DO, Upcloud, Vultr, Hivelocity,
and many others? Where the first few are bringing Bare Metal to its offering
along with Database aaS.

~~~
ljsmith93
Equinix has long been in the cloud game. Most public clouds have at least some
presence in their data centers or using their global network backbone. I do
believe this is their first venture into direct to consumer cloud sales
assuming they retain Packet's business model.

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daxorid
When IBM bought SoftLayer, it destroyed the value proposition of SoftLayer,
and we had to move.

Looks like we'll be shopping for a new provider, again.

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tsak
Running Bullshit.js over the press release...

[https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png](https://i.imgur.com/hNvmjvV.png)

~~~
johnedwards
Bare Metal Bullshit Packet is going to be my EDM group's name

~~~
penagwin
Freaking awesome name for a red team too haha.

