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Equinix is acquiring Packet

packet.com

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Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#21

Post by q3k »

cimnine wrote: post #19
Eikon wrote: post #4

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.

Vultr has byoip via BGP: https://www.vultr.com/features/bgp/ You can also implement anycast with it. Feel free to use my affiliate link worth 50$ to you: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7965104-4F

Vultr's BGP is not very good though. I regularly lose the full Internet BGP table from them and have to ask support to fix it. Supposedly it's some sort of limit of their network infrastructure. Another day they just randomly stopped announcing my prefix to the Internet, and since they don't even have a looking glass it was impossible to debug without, again, asking their support.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#22

Post by shaklee3 »

RationPhantoms wrote: post #13
Eikon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Packet is not doing virtualization.

No it's bare metal but can you not run your own virtualization software on the devices themselves?

I think the responder was questioning the phrase about packet asking about the customer VMs. You can certainly run VMs on top of bare metal, but packet doesn't know about that.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#23

Post by shaklee3 »

donalhunt wrote: post #11
shaklee3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know they're profitable?

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

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.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#24

Post by shaklee3 »

swyx wrote: post #16
Eikon wrote: post #4

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.

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 obv…

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.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#25

Post by Eikon »

swyx wrote: post #16
Eikon wrote: post #4

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.

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 obv…

Well, bare metal is usually way cheaper for way more performance at the cost of often being less managed.

What packet got right is that you get the same functionality that you could usually only get in colocation environments using high-end networking equipment.

You may want to look up on the Internet for “BGP” and “Autonomous System” to learn more.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#28

Post by Hydraulix989 »

mmmBacon wrote: post #26

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-...

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.

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#29

Post by dilyevsky »

pm90 wrote: post #18

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 compl…

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...

Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet

#30

Post by DetectiveX »

ep103 wrote: post #14
drej wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Any feedback is appreciated on this and what went wrong. I'd like to know how they can do better.
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