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.
Equinix is acquiring Packet
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#52A 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.
same exact situation...we moved over all bright eyed with hip skip and a hop in our step...within 24 hours we experienced a full system-wide outage followed by a full system-wide block storage outage a few days later....their system has the reliability of a hobby project
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
4 outages in 2 years isn't horrible.... AWS would have the same story, as would basically any other hosting provider.
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.
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#54Packet's blog post: 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...
Yeah, it feels like it has a lot of potential on paper, packet does a lot of stuff well that Equinix probably was thinking "why aren't we doing that? why isn't that us?"
It feels like one of those cases where you really want that vision to survive at scale.
Making it easier for Equinix to leverage its resources to get people cloud-y style capabilities that isn't attached at the hip to the other clouds sounds like it would be a pretty good thing. And for Equinix themselves, being able to expand their direct offerings without stepping directly on the toes of the other cloud giants that are also its customers is likely always a good thing in itself.
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#55Packet’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.
Google Cloud allows bring your own anycast ranges mapped to global load balancers.
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#56This is sad news. I used Packet for a benchmarking project (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).
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#57I'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.
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
same exact situation...we moved over all bright eyed with hip skip and a hop in our step...within 24 hours we experienced a full system-wide outage followed by a full system-wide block storage outage a few days later....their system has the reliability of a hobby project
I've been on Packet for over 14 months and haven't experienced any downtime, ever.
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#59I 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...
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.
Re: Equinix is acquiring Packet
#60"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 ...