Akamai to Acquire Linode
akamai.com
akamai.com
The cost to cut in an enterprise fiber link (1000/400) to our office was surprisingly low.
My experience trialling linode as a paying customer was really positive (VERY competitive price, great performance), only complaint being their NodeBalancer can’t automatically handle certificates like CF and AWS can.
Also, it needs to be mentioned because there’s a lot of negative in this thread: HUGE shout out to Linode for being massive community supporters and donating HEAPS of free compute to uni clubs and such, pretty much anyone with a charity certificate who asks for it. Fantastic company that’s easy to ‘just talk to people’ rather than trying to find the right support silo.
I may end up moving to AWS, but I'm dreading the pricing. Just estimating alone you damn near have to hire an expert. There's dozens of different ways to screw yourself and pay too much.
Hope Akamai doesn't do the dirty...
First VMs I had was from them. They had very good documentation and everything was simple.
Then I was introduced to 'wall of text' as a service, AWS, and never looked back.
My clients pay a fairly high premium for AWS because it allows them to move _faster_, not that it's _cheaper_.
The jobs both derive out of a very similar set of tools and expertise, it's typically the client that decides what hat I'm wearing.
AWS is extremely flexible and very very feature rich compared to linode. At that point, AWS was considered about 10 years ahead of competition.
If Linode is reading this - the incident took place over summer/fall of 2018. Yes, I'm that guy. No, I haven't forgotten. I've told _everyone_ who will listen this exact story, and warned them of having their own hard work and assets misappropriated by anyone with a fancy job title calling Linode support and demanding it. A phone call from Linode after everything was settled would have completely changed this sentiment. There's my own story of your outstanding lack of customer support. I was your biggest fan(for 9 years!) up until that point, and referred a dozen or more customers to your service.
Everyone will have their own counter of course but I've been happy with what I've been getting for the money!
Funny story: 2 months ago GCP blacklisted a few of Linode's IP subnets and we were cut out from using Google APIs. I was unable to get in touch with GCP support (not event complaining on social media) as they charge for support.
I asked to Linode's support if there is something that I could do even though it was not an issue created by them and they were aware of the issue and offered me to migrate our VMs to an IP subnet that was not banned.
Hell, I've been testing some "beta" products in AWS on my personal account with a spend of like... a couple grand a year and been put in touch with the lead engineer on the team responsible for the product to dig into my problems.
Google, on the other hand, even paying over a million a year for AdWords I regularly ran into problems that crossed into other domains and while the AdWords support staff were relatively easy to get a hold of, even once you were over the wall they were pretty honest in saying they wouldn't be able to get support on issues crossing into other teams and just suggested trying to find workarounds.
A year ago I was between jobs and broke, and asked for my upcoming $65 bill to be delayed until the month after. Since I had been a customer for quite a few years Support comped the then outstanding $65 and added another $65 to my Linode balance so I got a free month.
I hope the aquisition by Akamai makes their volume storage a bit cheaper though ;)
Damn it! Another shirt needs to go to a dry cleaner...
Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.
It's a classic case of not seeing the up and coming market because you were winning the existing market.
It would be a much bigger hurdle for Linode to become enterprise-friendly than for Akamai to become developer-friendly.
Akamai is "call for pricing" because they never evolved from an enterprise product. And no "enterprise" just buys off the shelf. They negotiate with a long budget, vendor risk management, legal, etc. process. Its unlikely that many of their contracts are even the same verbiage.
As far as I know companies usually evolve into an enterprise product, moving up the ladder, rather than going down.
Yes, the sales cycles are longer, but there’s more money and less headache with customer support and customer success.
E.g. 1 customer paying $10,000 per month vs 100 paying $99 p/m.
But we can all think of 100s of companies that did not do this and either died or are hollow shells of their former selves.
Cloudflare et al are commoditizing their gig. As more new blood goes into enterprises, they’ll want to use what they’re already familiar with vs the big enterprise thing they’ve never touched and find awkward.
I don’t know that a) I’m right or b) that they’ll be successful.
But Enterprising Linode would be folly. Even late entrants like Oracle Cloud are struggling due to lack of support from Enterprise cloud products. Changing them to support all the annoying acronym requirements of an Enterprise is a many year journey. AWS and Azure really only did that to support their huge government contracts.
I think the only other viable theory is for them to try and keep Linode as Linode as just a diversification play.
That would be odd, to me at least, because they’re buying an offering that seems to be slowly dying anyway. It really never left the hobbyist/tiny shop market, and even there, AWS/Azure is eating into them. I do have a soft spot for them as they’re a much more “human” company.
They have all the major compagnies / F500, though so no need to appeal to the HN crowd.
I wish I could fail so hard.
It’s not really apples to apples in terms of scale in the context of footprint
You can do most thing with configuration. EdgeWorkers are also available if you want to run your own JS at the Edge https://developer.akamai.com/akamai-edgeworkers-overview
Akamai sucks at selling to everyone.
Here's a typical Akamai experience:
* An Account Manager (AM) - in a suit - he is going to be the one talking. Not an expert in anything, except maybe Brooks Brothers suits from a few seasons ago.
* Account Manager's Lackey (AML) - he is going to be the one with an iPad. His job is to type in the notes of the meeting, typically using a two finger peck method. This of course takes a very long time. So everyone speaks slowly. Sometimes AM would ask AML something about things that are coming or being rolled out using Akamai internal jargon.
* Account Manager's Attachment (AMA) - does not really talk, looks uncomfortable. Based on the way AMA is dressed it might be a sales engineer
* Every single response to your question would be something that you can either find on the website ( AM, AML and AMA are convinced you cannot read ) which does not actually answer the question or is met with "I will need to loop in the appropriate parties and get you an answer"
* Nearly every request that one would presume can be completed programatically is met with "We need to engage professional services for that." which is billed at some insane amount
That's experience of paying Akamai millions of dollars a year. Needless to say, spending three years untangling Akamai integration was worth it.
I also use Prolexic DDoS service from Akamai, which was a standalone company until 2014. Akamai bought them, and the service actually vastly improved, so let's hope that Linode + Akamai's size and buying power will result in something even better.
If Akamai helps polish up some of the rough edges (there aren't very many for the record) that would be great. I've been eagerly anticipating managed databases for a little while, as well as bare metal and some other things. Would be neat if those things happen a little faster now that they have bigger capital behind them.
Around 2003 they were advertising via static banner ads on sourceforge.net, and I remember the offer being great for the time. Root in a “VM” (it was user mode Linux in those days) for something like $15/mo. I hung out in their IRC channel with caker and the early crew. I remember them talking about unboxing and racking servers and what their DCs were like. Can you imagine just casually chatting with someone who has intimate knowledge of your EC2 machine and its network?! It was a great time. I scored a free Xen VM when they were beta testing their transition and promptly had my first (and last so far!) experience getting a server hacked. Left it running with root ssh logins and a weak password. I migrated to other hosting services before the scandals hit I think. I’m glad to only have great memories and wish them all the best!
Great to see how he built Linode organically to the scale it has reached. In the context of venture capital and Y-combinator its a good contrasting story on how successful a bootstrapped, patiently built, profitable sustainable business can become when the focus is on excellent (and personal) customer service.
As a customer who's built significant value on their infrastructure, I'm a little bit worried about the impact this acquisition will have on their operations. I really hope it gives them the resources to improve on the same mission, and not the beginning of significant change!
Congrats to the Linode team, please don't leave us hanging!
I've been super happy with their service over the decade I've been using them, but I've steadily been using Vultr more and more recently.
I hope that being part of a public company won't cause too much pressure to reduce services or raise prices.
There aren't any clear alternatives to Linode this time.
But that said, we are missing a lot of details. As worried as I am, I'm going to give a company who really deserves the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of the doubt.
I would really, really appreciate a blog post or announcement or something though from Linode that details what things are changing and when. I know you may not know yet, but when you know if you could share I would greatly appreciate it.
Linode already use some of Cloudflare as part of their offering e.g nameservers, so I can already see how Akamai could begin to replace those under the hood and then augment Linode's existing services further to offer new capabilities to the small customers (that's how I envision it happening, Linode has a good customer experience and the Linode Manager is very polished now so it would make sense that Akamai would lean on it).
I'm discounting all the anecdotes and handful of past explosions, as any company as old as Linode will have them, and I find comparisons to AWS kind of absurd where you will likely be talking to a robot.
Isn't that the point? Akamai's weakness and Linode's strength.
I've no experience with Akamai at all so i'm interested in your's. However support quality and service quality are not always correlated, especially when support has been highly siloed or outsourced. Obviously they affect each other, but are you able to distinguish them? Would you be able to offer us any insight into the quality of the service they provided separate from the support issues?
> I have had multi million dollar accounts [...] AWS on the other had has been at a very high standard. And no robots.
I mean, once you are paying millions you are guaranteed a real person. I was talking about the small scale support issues which from what I hear on AWS usually results in automated responses. This is where Linode and AWS definitely differ.
Amazon are huge so mistakes will be made but AWS's support reputation is not just hype. (My experiences were APAC region, can't speak for rest of world).
Limit increases: looked automated?, person might get involved if automation can't approve.
Stuff outside the control plane (e.g. how do I install nginx on this?): - no idea, never asked those questions, don't expect they'd hold your hand much unless you're spending a lot. Maybe they'll send you a link.
Something broken with AWS in general: usually not timely responses but path here is to use PHD (personal health dashboard).
Something broken with AWS in my account: occasionally stuff inside AWS gets "stuck". I've had issues with CloudFormation, CloudFront, Custom Domain Names and ACM certs - when I was creating / destroying these things lots of times in integration tests. I generally got timely response for these and eventually the issue stopped happening.
Ah, I think this is the type of issue i've heard of where you hit a wall on AWS.
In my experience with Linode when there has been infra issues they are very open if pushed, which is useful because sometimes there are ways you can mitigate it if you understand what's going on... they will also pre-emptively open a ticket with your account in case you want to discuss it, most of the time these resolve themselves, but you can dig if you have concerns. e.g one time we had a few VPSs go through a vague "physical host failure" migration unusually close in time, so I asked if there was anything going on with hypervisor bugs (turns out there was a regression) and whether we could pre-emptively migrate stuff to patched hosts on our own terms rather than wait for it to be randomly picked - and they just opened up, explained what was going on and helped us schedule our other VPSs.
> Stuff outside the control plane (e.g. how do I install nginx on this?): - no idea, never asked those questions
Me neither, it's usually Linode specific support I use, they also have extended paid support for that type of stuff and I've never used it but it's there for people who need it.
"For the immediate future, we will continue to operate as we always have. Akamai has no intention of changing what has made us successful. This acquisition will propel us both forward — not take anything away. Linode will soon be able to call on the power of Akamai to offer entirely new products, services, expertise, locations, and scale, while Akamai will be able to tap into Linode’s deep expertise in compute, storage, and on-demand infrastructure-as-a-service.
Today, we start a new chapter in Linode’s story — one that strengthens our position in a market increasingly looking for alternatives. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.
Thank you — our customers, partners, and community — for supporting and empowering us to make cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible."
Happens every time
1. In the short term, it's probably the same.
2. In the medium term, things start to get weird.
3. By the time Aker exits, Linode probably only exists as a brand. Everything special about it will be gone. Support will be offshore and terrible.
There needs to be another way for a business to take on investment without focusing on an exit.
The DAO model is really interesting (I current work for one) which allows investors to exit any time they want by just selling the tokens they bought.
Really? I'm not.
Also, it's not "negativity." It's realism. When human-scale firms like Linode get acquired by massive companies, they lose their way. The things that made them good -- excellent support, understandable product lines, etc -- vanish in the name of integration with the mothership. It's happened over and over in tech, including and especially in hosting/VPS providers.
The press release is borderline offensive in its "nothing will change" babble. Obviously nothing will change TOMORROW, but within 24 to 36 months Akamai will have ruined every good thing about Linode.
It's nice the founders got a payday, but everyone who relies on Linode's current responsiveness should be looking for an alternative provider immediately. It's irrational to expect this will pan out any differently than every other time a massive leviathan absorbed a beloved small player.
>But that said, we are missing a lot of details.
There are no details that will change any of the above.
Packet.net seems to be doing well under Equinix
Akamai market cap is 18B and 8300 employees
1. Killed the sole reason why people use CentOS. 2. Has so tightly integrated systemd and NetworkManager to Fedora that it's essentially unusable for server environments.
Sure, Red Hat has been fine.
Digital Ocean is the most similar, but after getting burned hard by them I will never put myself in that vulnerable position again.
I've been pretty happy with OVH thus far, but at least last time I checked the US presence was minimal and that's important to my customers.
I'm going to be kicking the tires on Hetzner and Vultr soon, because DO is not a super satisfying backup plan for me.
I've used Azure enough to get spun up quickly there, but that would be an unhappy upward adjustment on my budget or an unhappy downward adjustment on the performance I expect.
The downside is price as UpCloud bundle less and charge for everything.
Linode: "We're really sorry, there's a kernel bug and we absolutely have to patch it. See here for the CVE. We're scheduling it for time X but you can do it in advance on the web panel at a better time for you."
Digital Ocean: "Isn't it great? We're rebooting your machine at time X and you'll get new better stuff! No, there's no way to change the time or delay it."
Normally their service is pretty invisible to the end user so it would be weird if you noticed them when things were working fine.
Is this Akamai trying to buy access to a market who would previously not even consider them, or is it Akamai trying to buy access to the more general cloud infrastructure market? If they're trying to do both I can't see it going down well.
[ source: I was a part of those failures ]
Disclaimer: Worked @ Akamai
My impression of Akamai was always if you have to ask the price then you can't afford it. It seems an odd match. I guess the thinking is that they both have to compete with AWS and provide a one stop shop which is probably true to some extent but certainly not for a customer like me.
I have been a small Linode customer off and on for over 15 years and in that time they have had ups and downs, made very public mistakes and learned from them. Overall they generally supplied a competitive product and decent customer service. So I hope this works out well for all involved. If not there is lots of competition still in this space.
For many years, I have run all my websites and services (back-ends for apps, etc.) on a few $5/month Nanodes.
For temporary/experimental stuff I sometimes use Vultr and Digital Ocean, but Linode's service and reliability is superior (especially versus Vultr). Linode is just top-notch.
That same Nanode has been running the back-end of an Android app for almost 5 years, on another port.
I've called their support line many times to report business-impacting issues, and they always answer within seconds (literally), provide competent support, follow-up, and genuinely care. Linode support may be better than Amex Platinum Card support. :-)
If talking about today, almost assuredly given your description.
This is pretty offtopic to the OP but I felt compelled to chime in as it really irritates me, that Amex support has gone into the toilet over the past 2 years or so. I remember a time when you called, and someone would just answer "hello mr xxx" if it was the number on file. Now it's phone menus, typing in your card number, other details, hold times, etc...even on Platinum support.
Compare to how word of mouth of Google horror stories is part of why their market share in cloud computing is running even with Alibaba's based on what I just found for 2021.
I tried DO and hated it because they used a zillion 3rd-party services on all their internal web pages (after being signed in) so I was in a constant battle enabling things with NoScript.
I have a small Vultr VM I use for testing. Their site didn't require enabling a bunch of 3rd-party domains. They've been rock solid as well, like Linode, and cheap as dirt: I have a small VM with IP4 from years ago for $2.50/mo
I have two grandfathered 2.50 packages with an ip (no domain pointing).. no issues ever but it's a playground not a production box for me.
DO's UI has gone downhill since 2017. It is so bloated and large. Used to be very compact.
Folks from Cloudflare if you're reading this - please keep your UI compact. Your main UI (Dashboard) looks more compact that the docs[1] which are too sparse and terrible for developers who are not average consumers. They can handle the complexity. They also appear to be designed by two separate UI design teams. You guys need an authoritarian designer at the top.
Btw I find the large split words as numbers ("makes 150M more" -> "makes a hundred fifty million more") quite hard to read, but maybe that's just me.
Cloudflare (NET) has higher revenue: $431M vs $318M
Digital Ocean (DOCN) has higher profit (net income): -$44M to -$119M
Cloudflare is growing revenue faster, but also increasing losses to get there.
There are some smaller differences. DO has more managed DB offerings, but Linode is catching up quickly. I really like Linode's Lish tool. I also like Linode's Green Light Program.
For the immediate future, we will continue to operate as we always have. Akamai has no intention of changing what has made us successful. This acquisition will propel us both forward — not take anything away. Linode will soon be able to call on the power of Akamai to offer entirely new products, services, expertise, locations, and scale, while Akamai will be able to tap into Linode’s deep expertise in compute, storage, and on-demand infrastructure-as-a-service.
I like Linode and been with them for ~5 years. Their pricing didn't change much (if at all) during that time but hosting landscape got more competitive since then. Hetzner and OVH offer a better value I believe. I hope Akamai's resources will help them to not lose in the long run.
All the buyers say that now. In 2 years, it will change.
For Akamai, I wonder if this acquisition will have a negative impact on their ability to work with other providers who are now competitors. Similar to how AWS has trouble signing clients in the retail industry.
I used Slicehost for years, but they got swallowed by Rackspace and became unusable. Linode has been my home since then. I have no positive experiences with small providers who get swallowed by corporate borgs. :(
A lot of bitcoin theft in 2012 (maybe by their own staff?)
2013 some kind of cold fusion / HTP hack
Another CF / HTP hack here.
2014 brought the MySQL server no password stuff.
2015 ish some kind of total root compromise?
You can get a feel for all this here including the denials / lack of notification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845985
Maybe 2016 same issue?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-firm-linode-resets-user-...
Not a company I'd put much actual production onto. Imagine if AWS had a hacker running around with total root access, able to reset MFA tokens to their own etc with no notice to customers. I'm not even sure such root access exists on AWS.
And when I suggested this to their support they acted like I was crazy and said there is no way to switch between ipv4 and ipv6. Well I don't work in networking but I do work for a major telco and I know our networking guys could have done that routing change, easy.
This was resolved and it didn’t appear something nefarious or any kind of ban was going on, so if you have some references I’d love to see them
It's not malice, it's just incompetence.
Why the block was banned I have no idea and I don't really care, it can happen and they need to be able to handle it.
I literally had a support case asking what happened, no response, eventually I had to say "look, I'm moving now because all services are down, please tell me what is going on", no answer, I had to move to get my services back up.
https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22243/google-and-...
To note, we have had problems with AWS blocking random addresses as well where we've had staff abroad.
Email address in profile
I never bothered to jump through those hoops for like a dollar (now about US$10k):
http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/03/bitcoin-faucet-hacked....
He only lost 5 bitcoin (like $20 then or $200k today), but another lost 3100, or around… $124 million today:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66916.0
They ran a Bitcoin mining pool and this hack motivated them to create a hardware wallet:
https://blog.trezor.io/how-trezor-was-born-from-a-hacking-at...
(another recent story on ether hack had the same "resolution" the organization just chose to replaced the losses) ...
where is that money coming from? does not seem real
For reference there is mandatory disclosure of (serious) data breaches in the GPDR and it's very uncommon that the disclosure actually occurs.
If you think they were unique or egregious in terms of 3rd party access to networks, i am afraid that you will find reality disappointing.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/09/inside-target-corp-days-...
Manager Security Incident
Ensuring the security of our platform is our top priority. We maintain a strong security policy and aim to communicate openly should it ever be compromised. Thus, we are posting to describe a recent incident affecting the Linode Manager.
Here are the facts:
This morning, an intruder accessed a web-based Linode customer service portal. Suspicious events prompted an immediate investigation and the compromised credentials used by this intruder were then restricted. All activity via the web portal is logged, and an exhaustive audit has provided the following:
All activity by the intruder was limited to a total of eight customers, all of which had references to "bitcoin". The intruder proceeded to compromise those Linode Manager accounts, with the apparent goal of finding and transferring any bitcoins. Those customers affected have been notified. If you have not received a notification then your account is unaffected. Again, only eight accounts were affected.
The portal does not have access to credit card information or Linode Manager user passwords. Only those eight accounts were viewed or manipulated -- no other accounts were viewed or accessed.
Security is our number one priority and has been for over eight years. We depend on and value the trust our customers have placed in us. Now, more than ever, we remain committed to ensuring the safety and security of our customers' accounts, and will be reviewing our policies and procedures to prevent this from ever recurring.
---
I won't argue Linode is blameless here, but seems like the only reason it had such an outsized impact was because the 8 customers who were targeted evidently didn't do much to protect their assets from someone gaining unauthorized access to their servers--which is always a possibility with any publicly exposed server with or without a breach of the service provider being involved.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845985
Doesn't it seem kind of crazy that folks get full root control plane on linode so frequently?
IMO, it's plain wrong to categorize that one as "getting full root control plane", where it was instead the compromising of individual accounts that may have had no access to the resources on an account.
Not sure if that’s changed. (Hopefully it has!)
DO's the only one out of the major VPS players to go public. It's not amateur hour over there anymore.
My metric though is this: Someone has admin level access to full root on control plane and does things to customer accounts they don't want. A customer complains that the control plane has been used to reset things / asks for logs / etc.
That's your opportunity to identify a root level control plane hack, disclose it, do the password reset things, remediate and move forward.
OR - You don't disclose things till much later, you deny things, you provide scrubbed logs. Add in the bitcoin angle where this type of story is pretty common (trusted entity runs away with coins because they are easy to steal) - and couple that with how they handled the reports -> as I said in my comment, I'd be careful putting sensitive info onto that platform.
Could it have happened, sure. Do I think that it was an inside job? No, not at all. 99% of the people there at that time thought Bitcoin was insanely dumb, and I suspect most of us still do.
I don't think there was ever really a consensus on this. Lots of people (myself included, but also quite a few friends) always thought Bitcoin was just kinda useless. It's just that in 2012 there were comparatively low stakes (i.e. no massive energy use, not yet massive amounts of people pouring money in it, no massive amounts of "crypto snakeoil") that it just wasn't worth commenting on.
Many still believe in the idea that (certain, less well know) crypto can be used as a real currency, but unfortunately the public severely tainted it with ideas of 'being an asset'.
This comment reads as someone who is more aligned with the public's (HN) perception of modern crypto, rather than the use of it pre-2010.
Everyone thinks of bitcoin in terms of “how many USD is it?” I don’t know what the solution is but as long as we think of bitcoin as a perverted asset like housing - apparently people once again believe we will not allow housing prices to fall to any significant degree - there is no reason to use bitcoin as a currency. With so much speculation, the price is too volatile.
I don’t know what the solution is but I believe transaction costs should be minimal if not zero. I don’t know how we will achieve this but apparently there are other projects that try to get much closer to zero transaction fees. I think that is the future
Lots of us thought bitcoin was dumb back then. Lots of us still do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
https://scottpeterjohnson.github.io/hashwall/dist/index.html
I think I get your sentiment(?), but I'm uncertain of whether or not it matters how individuals value 'success' or 'currency' when it comes to personal property. To extend to the logical consequences, I am not sure if people on HN would agree that personal property should be non-existent.
Now if $some_duder_was_really_into_bitcoin was also on the staff at the time, then sure, maybe they would risk their job to steal some bitcoin because they thought it was cool to do hax0r things with cyberpunk money. I'm not aware of that person existing.
As I noted elsewhere, there's an opportunity to do the right thing when someone comes to you and says look, someone is coming in on the control plane and resetting my server passwords.
And yes, that includes looking at your staff especially when bitcoin is in the mix as its less traceable to a person.
For some reason, for year after year, there was this pattern. No problem, we have good security, oh wait, we've been rooted for months. Or someone is coming in on the staff admin plane and taking all sorts of action.
It could be outside hackers sure. But linode never seemed that interested in sorting things out.
The takeaway I had was that you might not notice if a staff person OR hacker was messing around.
It’s a baseless and unfair attack and I think you should consider deleting your original comment.
https://wptavern.com/wp-engine-identifies-cloud-infrastructu...
This followed the pagerduty hack. We don't know who else was getting hacked either - these were to high profile ones.
So this just raised the question - what's up that they don't take serious issues seriously? With bitcoin there have been a ton of insider issues with how "trusted" infrastructure providers and exchanges handling bitcoin so that was the question.
Even if external hackers, they just got hacked over and over.
Also hey lbotos, hope you're doing well!
I remember that rash of Bitcoin thefts and it was all careless behavior by the Linode owner becoming a secondary consequence of a primary employee compromise, I think. As in what happened to Twitter. Think “admin panel compromised, external actor searches for Linodes known to participate in Bitcoin, methodically compromises them one by one, finds poorly stored wallets and drains them”. That intruder very obviously knew what they were after, if memory serves, but this was almost ten years ago.
Seriously. Linode did one thing well and it was hire (mostly) good people. The comms around security incidents could always use improvement, and I think that led to the loss of trust you’re seeing here. I don’t think it’s just Linode, either, I think a lot of the industry is overly discreet when it comes to what to say publicly about events like this. We see the same with journalism: a lot of methods in reporting are trade skills and most people don’t understand the news gathering process, which leaves room to fill in the gaps with conspiracy. So it is with security, too.
I’d back your speculation, Tim: there were maybe two people, definitely one, maybe two, who could both perform the crime and hide it. One’s an unsavory person to interact with if he doesn’t like you but ultimately ethical and a force for good at his core. The other runs the company. Convince me that either of them did that and you may as well convince me the Earth is flat.
But that doesn't matter anymore. This was nearly a generation ago in tech companies, and they are now part of a bigger one.
https://wptavern.com/wp-engine-identifies-cloud-infrastructu...
How do you sit on breaches like this for months and cause all this downline pain to your customers is crazy.
I don't see bigger companies moving yet (most of them are building their own infra on top of OpenShift and VMware), but I know a few small companies that are.
Man I suck at typing positive reviews. Happy customer since 2012-03-13
Do they do a TON more stuff these days? Yes. But my standard bumpkin Linode instance keeps chugging along. Upgrade/replacement to new hardware? They handle it, I get alerts but otherwise I don't need to take action.
I'm happy for them that they got bought, because it brings (hopefully) a lot of value to all those people who worked so hard to get to this point in time. However as a customer I worry, of course I worry. Clearly Akamai wants to be the next big cloud, not just a CDN. Linode wants to be that next big cloud too. So it's a great fit. But will that push to The Next Big Thing kill off what made them great for the little guys? Maybe.
It'll still be good for their business, just bad for me.
I'm guessing Digital Ocean will be next.
I don't think that DigitalOcean will be acquihired.
Nah, this is about acquiring a business for 9x revenue...
A true acquisition still is a strong possibility, but certainly far less likely than before the IPO, and it might be described as a merger.
Maybe Akamai will stop blocking Linode IPs for their firewall snake oil? One can dream.
All the best to Linode, I will keep using it unless something changed dramatically.
I've run jsonip.com off of linode for over a decade. They've been incredibly reliable as a hosting service.
I don't have any experience with Akamai, but I generally find acquisitions are the death of any good service.
Goddamn it.
I also hope this opens up Akamai CDN / DDoS access to consumers rather than Enterprise. Not that it matter as much anymore in the era of Cloudflare.
Hopefully this gives enough resources for Linode to continue and grow.
I feel bad for their customer support today. They have kind of trained people to go ahead and ask questions by being responsive. The number of dumb questions no one really knows the answer to will be at an all time high today.
Anyway congrats to Aker and other staff, hope they can all retire comfortably or take a long vacation if they want.
They were extremely helpful and polite. I hope that all the employees get good kickbacks from the sale.
(Super open to being corrected here, just always found them interesting to be in Philly since I don't know of many tech co's there)
I'm personally of the opinion that a greater diversity of many smaller companies is almost always preferable to homogeneity and the anticompetitive inclinations that come with the vertically integrated corporations that currently plague a good bit of the tech sector, but Akamai + Linode doesn't strike me as the same kind of threat as the larger players.
That said, I am a longtime happy Linode customer, and the prospect of anything coming along to dilute their current offerings and practices is concerning. But they've earned the benefit of the doubt, so until I have some specific reason to do otherwise I'll be sticking with them.
I don't have a lot of use for it, but I think their load balancer could be better, so hopefully this will happen now.
It’s crazy how much you need to know to do the above.
Akamai - make it happen!
Linode has really gone down the tubes. Just try to find out what the prices are for their services. Or how to actually use any of the services they provide besides a VM instance. Can you find the magical documentation site without Google? I couldn't. And pricing for some services requires you to sign up for an account and attempt to deploy the service, or you have to go through a "professional services" team for a "quote".
DigitalOcean and AWS don't have a problem directing users toward product information or docs, and they provide a simple web UI to use all their services. But Linode can't seem to grasp it, after years of trying to roll out a new web UI. Rather than provide you simple managed services wrapped around specific technology, they provide "scripts" you can execute as a single VM boots up. They can't even show you how to create a VPC without burying it 4 levels deep in a drop-down menu of a specific linode created in a specific region.
I got so fed up with it that I moved my one remaining linode off to DO. Not only do they have more services in more regions, but I can actually find the information I need to make changes.
> Just try to find out what the prices are for their services.
From the Linode.com homepage, click "products" in the main menu, click any product, and the pricing is on the page. There's a "view full price list" link on each page to a price list for all products on a single page:
https://www.linode.com/pricing/
> Can you find the magical documentation site without Google?
From the Linode.com homepage, click "Docs" at the top. "Docs" is linked to https://www.linode.com/docs/
If you start from a product page, each contains a direct link to that product's section of the docs. For example, the Kubernetes page links directly to https://www.linode.com/docs/products/compute/kubernetes/ with the link "View product documentation >", above the fold.
Both are the top menu.
When they launched their Image Manager product them had trouble persuading sales people to sell it are it reduced bandwidth charges
The legacy of lots of PoPs makes them expensive to run, and purges take longer but ironically may help when it cones to moving content to be really close to the end user
You know Schlumberger and Bechtel have really tanked in the consumer branding, But I'd hesitate to say they are "dying"
I think there is no world in which Akamai can be said to be "dying"
Unless you have some knowledge of the balance sheet, This is hyperbole