Earlier this year, Equinix acquired Packet, a bare metal automation platform that provided dedicated bare metal machines through an API. Equinix has now integrated Packet to create Equinix Metal, which was essentially the same offering with slight differences, including integrations with various DevOps tooling. With Equinix Metal, customers can also leverage other offerings of Equinix platform, including Equinix Fabric.

“Equinix Metal is ideal for any workload that is data and processor intensive,” said Mark Coleman, Director of Developer Relations at Equinix. “Companies are already leveraging Equinix Metal and other offerings to improve performance. A good example is LogDNA that uses Equinix Metal to get quicker response from the application and more bang for their buck per core by building their cloud with Equinix Metal. Grafana is another very well-known company in the Cloud Native world which is leveraging Equinix to connect their local installation of Grafana to Grafana’s SAS directly using an Equinox Fabric connection.

Bare metal for developers
Developers haven’t paid much attention to the hardware side of infrastructure in the past, but Equinix Metal is changing that: it brings the advantage of hardware with abstraction through Kubernetes, which opens up more options to be able to use bare metal where it makes sense. Equinix Metal is ideal for developers who need single tenancy, lower latency than a hypervisor, lower total cost of ownership, etc. It allows them to take advantage of public cloud along with bare-metal; a pure multi-cloud, hybrid cloud story. “I think being able to take the best in class software tooling from a certain company and apply it with infrastructure from another company, I think opens up a lot of really interesting opportunities for the end user.”

Equinix Metal gives developers access to automated bare-metal infrastructure that meets their exact needs and can be deployed globally. When combined with Equinix Fabric customers can also take advantage of:
1) fixed price for bandwidth per month so there are no egress charges surprises;
2) fixed latencies so you users it’s going to be quick but you also know it’s going to be stable
3) Data now goes through a secure pipe that users can control instead of the open internet.

Neutral, open bare metal will unlock the Hybrid Cloud and connect public CSPs Equinix is certainly not looking at competing with public cloud vendors who also happen to be the customers of the company. Equinix Metal is just putting another piece in the multi-cloud, hybrid cloud model by offering on-demand, bare metal through an API at software speed. “It’s all about giving customers choices as they know what’s best for their business, better than we do,” said Coleman.