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So when the opportunity came around to work for a cloud company that was allowing me to use an API called "Get a physical server in a rack, with networking, with GPUs, with CPUs, with RAM, and no other noisy neighbors, no virtual machines" - I mean, it just seemed like magic. And the team at Equinix Metal is just pheno... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that makes a lot of sense, because you're right, that's one of the things which attracted me to Packet at the time, in that you could get those really amazing machines, really amazing hosts which you couldn't get anywhere else via an API call. That was as simple as it is, being able to make an... |
The other thing is the focus on networking. I could appreciate the focus that Packet at the time was putting on actual hardware networking, layer 2, layer 3 stuff - that is very, very rare, by the way. And the Equinix acquisition makes sense. Equinix - isn't it all about networking, data centers? That's how I know Equi... |
So what I'm wondering is now that Packet is with Equinix? How is it different? Were you there before, or did you know Packet before? What changed since Equinix, do you know? |
**Marques Johansson:** \[07:57\] I came along after the announcement was out there. What hadn't changed yet was the name, Packet; it hadn't yet changed to Equinix Metal, just as a division, as a product of Equinix. What I've noticed is that going form an org of about 200 people to an org of about 10,000 people, there's... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Do you remember much about Packet, David, before Equinix Metal? |
**David Flanagan:** I had used it a fair number of times. I thought it was a really cool service. It had some limitations around availability facilities. I think Packet before the Equinix acquisition was only available in 6-7 facilities... And when you look at it, that's a great acquisition, because Equinix literally a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the one thing which what you've told me reminded me of was what bare metal servers used to be like before Packet... And I don't think people realize just how big Equinix Metal now is. So before, anyone used ServerBeach or ServerCentral? |
**David Flanagan:** No... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** IBM, they acquired some -- SoftLayer. That's it, that's the company; do you remember SoftLayer? Do you remember RackSpace, when you used to get server from those companies? ServerBeach even precedes them... But there was that SoftLayer, there was also in Europe OVH; they were a very big bare metal hos... |
Packet came along and you thought "Well, this is neat. It's small, it's interesting, it's a crazy, good idea, very simply executed..." And I think since Equinix Metal Packet grew a lot. And I don't think people can appreciate just how big Equinix Metal actually is. I don't think people can appreciate how big Equinix Me... |
So you mentioned 60 locations... What about the instances? What about the networks? Did anything change regarding the services that it offers? |
**David Flanagan:** Well, you're asking what's changed from the Packet days to the Equinix Metal days, and I think there are a number of things worth highlighting - we're moving our hardware from our older, what we call legacy facilities that Packet owned, into these massive IBXes that Equinix has all around the world.... |
\[12:00\] So by leveraging their backbone, using their network, moving our hardware into their facilities, we're getting access to all of that. And because Equinix have direct partnership with all of the major cloud providers, every workload on the internet is probably on AWS, GCP, Azure, maybe some Equinix Metal, mayb... |
And of course, there's the hardware component of it as well, something that Marques kind of touched on - there's a higher price on the actual server itself taking up the physical space within the business exchange... So we have had to let go of some of those smaller instances... But you know, that's a trade-off we're m... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's a great point, and I think this is most likely the best outcome, or at least one of the best outcomes, because you still keep the simplicity of provisioning these instances, of defining your network, but you also benefit from the scale of Equinix. And that is a great combination. So I d... |
**David Flanagan:** And why would people, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. |
**David Flanagan:** Until I joined Equinix, I had no idea who Equinix was, and then I'm in the door three months and just overwhelmed by how much Equinix really is there across the internet. Really, really cool. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. |
**Marques Johansson:** You kind of don't wanna know that, right? ...when there's some sort of status page outage, something wrong in an Equinix facility, it is a big deal, so it's good to not hear about those things, to have them not actually happen. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. One thing which hasn't changed, by the way - or at least I think hasn't changed - is that you still forgot to build Kubernetes. Do you remember that post from Zach? That was a great one. "Sorry, we forgot to build the Kubernetes platform", or whatever the title was, but that was a great one. I'l... |
**David Flanagan:** Yeah, that's a great question. I think Equinix Metal is probably one of the few clouds -- in fact, probably the one cloud that doesn't have a managed Kubernetes these days. I think what we're seeing is that Kubernetes is now becoming this ubiquitous API for deploying applications, and all cloud prov... |
And there's some really good reasons for that. One is that Equinix Metal have no control over the hardware when it's provisioned to you. So you come along, you use the API or any of the providers and say "Here, I want some bare metal." Other than us stamping on a network configuration, that machine is yours. We can't g... |
People want flexibility and the power of bare metal, which is why you come to \[unintelligible 00:15:15.24\] All of that is really important. You don't want Equinix Metal's provisioning steps or anything that we are doing to get in the way of that. The machine is, for all intents and purposes, your machine. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think you want the purity, right? You want the purity of hardware. So keep that experience as pure as possible, without adding any of your daemons, or any of your agents, or whatever you wanna call them... So keep it as pure and pristine as possible from what you would get if you were to physically ... |
**David Flanagan:** \[16:01\] That's where I come in specifically? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. Like, you with the Rawkode Academy, right? What is the best way that you can get the neatest Kubernetes on top of the bare metal infrastructure, as well as many other things? Because let's be honest, Kubernetes is an amazing technology, but it's just that. It's just one way of orchestrating cont... |
So rather than pinning yourself to a specific technology, you're keeping the two separate, but still allowing users to mix it nicely, so they get the best of both worlds, without basically having the abstractions leak into one another, right? Because that's what tends to happen - CNIs, CSIs... |
**David Flanagan:** I think that's a really interesting point that you mentioned about "Will we be running our workloads on Kubernetes in five years?" And I wanna kind of come back to that in a different tact. What is Kubernetes? It's a distributed system for running distributed systems. It is a distributed system made... |
Of course, the Kubernetes project only makes certain things flexible right now, which is the CSI, the CRI and the CNI. So you have free rein to pick whatever plugins you want there. But I see that evolving over the next five years. I don't think we'll be running Kubernetes in five years as what Kubernetes looks like to... |
So I think we'll still always have the Kubernetes API in five years, I just think that the underlying components of that Kubernetes cluster won't look like a Kubernetes cluster today. And with regards to how you get Kubernetes on bare metal - we're seeing conversions on Kubeadm. I think being able just to run Kubeadm o... |
**Break**: \[18:35\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So Kubernetes on bare metal sounds great... I'm not a Kubernetes expert myself, but I have been running it in production for a couple of years. I know most of the components fairly well. I know where to look when there's problems, I know how to fix many things - not all things - but still, Kubernetes ... |
**David Flanagan:** People that want their access to the \[unintelligible 00:20:08.10\] are typically power users, and they will have their own custom configurations for Kubernetes. One of the reasons that we don't offer a managed service. But we still wanna be able to make bare metal Kubernetes for people that are jus... |
**Marques Johansson:** As David was saying, Kubeadm - that seems to be the most popular way to deploy Kubernetes... And what you can do is you can layer things on top of that experience and express more opinions. We offer a bunch of Terraform modules that are essentially proof of concept; integrations where you can run... |
These take advantage of Kubeadm underneath, and we have others that take advantage of k3s, we have others that take advantage of Anthos, and the list goes on. There's OpenShift integrations... These are all Terraform modules, and there's a -- Pulumi is another example, where Pulumi takes advantage of Terraform drivers.... |
One of the patterns that we're trying to promote is the Cluster API way of deploying, because a Cluster API is an opinionated way to deploy Kubernetes. It is a Kubernetes resource, it takes some set inputs, and a few minutes later you have a Kubernetes cluster that is managed from another Kubernetes cluster... As David... |
**David Flanagan:** I think where Cluster API fits in - I give a lot of credit to that project - is that if you were to provision a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal with Equinix Metal through \[unintelligible 00:22:28.05\] through Terraform, through whatever means (even Ansible), you're still solely responsible for ope... |
But the Cluster API actually brings in that reconciliation from Kubernetes, to monitor and help nurture that control plane for you. It does remediation of control plane nodes, it can do in-lane updates of closed nodes, so it can spin up new ones, cutting out old ones when things are unhealthy, you can take it out of th... |
So Cluster API is literally single-handedly trying to make this experience easier for people that don't necessarily know how to operate Kubernetes... Meaning it can use a managed service, like GKE or EKS, to run Cluster API, but provision a bare metal cluster on Equinix Metal... Get all that performance and flexibility... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that's really interesting... If I'm hearing it correctly, you can have a managed Kubernetes cluster to manage other clusters. Is that right? Is that what you're saying? |
**David Flanagan:** Exactly what we're saying. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[23:43\] Okay, that's very interesting. So how would you be able to visualize all the clusters that you're running? Because as we know, two leads to four, and four leads to eight, and so on and so forth; that's the way it just goes. So how can you keep that under control if you have one Kubernetes cl... |
**Marques Johansson:** It's an interesting problem that, in a sense, isn't our problem. There's a lot of tools out there, a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out that space. I mentioned Anthos as one, so if you have your GKE clusters and you want to run something on bare metal alongside that, you can use t... |
We mentioned Kubeadm and k3s - they're yet another installer. You can take advantage of Docker Machine drivers to deploy their nodes. There's a lot of different solutions out there in the cloud-native ecosystem. |
**David Flanagan:** One that I like the most probably is just using Flux or Argo, because those both have UIs. The Flux UI is quite early right now, and the Argo one is much more sophisticated... But because the cluster API is just declarative manifests, all your cluster definitions live in a Git repository that are ap... |
Because the Kubernetes Cluster API project is using the \[unintelligible 00:25:24.12\] on all of those objects within the control plane cluster -- no, the management cluster they call it... The Argo UI can also show you when you've got nodes that are unhealthy through a nice visual indicator. |
You can use tools like Rancher, like Marques said, or you can use Argo. Once you're in the Kubernetes API, you've got this unlimited flexibility, which is both a good thing and a curse. There'll be dragons. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like that idea. I can see how that would work. So I used ArgoCD first... I think it was a few months back, with -- I think it was episode 3 or 4. I can't remember. The one with Lars, where we -- it was like the follow-up to "Why Kubernetes?" I think it was episode 5. And we looked at what it ... |
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