Guest: Jeremy Tanner (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Equinix (Twitter)

Equinix is helping companies scale their business with on-demand, cost-optimized infrastructure via Equinix Metal. In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk recorded at the KubeCon in Detroit, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Jeremy Tanner, Developer Relations at Equinix, to discuss their new product, trends driving bare metal adoption, and Equinix’s collaboration with the larger cloud native community.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Equinix Metal came about after the company acquired Packet. Since then, Equinix has amassed over 240 distributed data centers and is working on providing more. Tanner explains that having something on-demand via infrastructure, code, and configuration tools can address supply chain difficulties.
• Use cases that reduce complexity and increase performance are driving the adoption of bare metal. This includes performance data projects or writing for a specific architecture such as an ARM machine that requires GPUs.
• Equinix Metal is a machine with an operating system. It is connected to the world’s best network and is helping providers meet developers where they are.
• Equinix’s network of partners helps with container orchestration or different uses, or distributed databases like Amazon’s Kubernetes distribution or PKS.
• GPU-optimized workloads or those that optimize databases are well suited for bare metal.
• Tanner explains that since the Packet days, there was a need for infrastructure for all the open-source projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella. He discusses how Equinix’s hardware and network power the Community Infrastructure Lab. People can apply to be a part of the program to test or build on specific hardware, or just for resources to keep their artifacts.
• Tanner’s role in Developer Relations is to tell the Equinix story. He explains the benefits of Equinix, being the largest provider of colocation and connecting you with different providers such as AWS and Azure.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.