Meet Packet – The Elastic Cloud Infrastructure Without The Virtualization Tax

In 2008, when Amazon decided to expose virtual machines as a service, which was controlled and managed through an API, it was considered revolutionary. Dubbed as Amazon EC2, it paved the way for the emergence of the fastest growing cloud services delivery model, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Fast forward to 2017, almost every small and large cloud provider offers compute as a service based on virtualized infrastructure. Amazon EC2 and its competitive offerings are all based on virtualization technology powered by the hypervisor. With IaaS hitting its tenth year of existence, what’s next for cloud users? Where is the innovation in the cloud infrastructure headed?

Cloud computing is witnessing a rapid pace of adoption driven by enterprises, small & medium businesses, and startups. Enterprise customers are lifting and shifting a variety of workloads ranging from ERP, CRM, SCM, and traditional line-of-business applications. Small and medium businesses and startups are investing in a new breed of applications that are based on evolving trends like analytics, Big Data, containers, and microservices. These next generation applications demand unmatched performance that is often delivered by powerful servers running within the private datacenters. While almost all the cloud infrastructure offerings provide benefits in the form of self-service, automation, programmability, and pay-by-use, customers are now looking for infrastructure that guarantees the same performance as the physical servers in enterprise datacenters.

Founded in 2014, Packet is a bare metal cloud platform that promises the power of cloud without the performance penalty. Unlike other IaaS providers that rely on a hypervisor to deliver automation capabilities, Packet aims to offer physical machines as a service. It claims that there are no noisy neighbors, shared resources, or hypervisors that interfere with the performance. Customers can follow the familiar workflow of launching machines, attaching storage, configuring networking, and deploying applications – all on bare metal, physical servers that do not suffer from the side effects of virtualization. The API is simple to use, which can be easily integrated with existing management tools.

Read the entire article at Forbes

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.