The Linode brand is so well known by developers. Why in the world would Akamai risk the brand any further than they already have like this?
Linode is a good service among a lot of equally good competitors (digitalOcean, ec2/lightsail, ovh, hetzner, vulter) in the space, but it's not as much a house name as Heroku or Github - it's not a trailbrazer, the cheapest, the most advanced or the first of it's kind. It's a good solid choice among other solid choices.
On the other hand Akami is, in many circles, known as the best (as a CDN at least - it is regarded by many as the most expansive, most stable and most feature rich), it is recognized by many as first (as a cdn) and is very much a house name.
On the contrary, Akamai is incredibly well known.
When I think Linode, I think developer, small consultancy, etc. When I think Akamai, I think enterprise. Completely different brands.
It just seems like such a bizarre business decision to me for Akamai to throw a strong brand like that away just because they want to slap their name on the product instead.
All in all, I’m pretty sure this will turn out to have been a mistake.
I've used Digital Ocean and all the big cloud providers. Vercel, Netlify, Heroku.
Haven't touched Akamai, but I certainly know of it.
Heroku's original value prop was essentially "You don't have to set up a Linode for your rails app anymore, now you can just $git push heroku".
Edit: I just checked. DigitalOcean launched their beta product in 2012. I think it took another couple years before developers started to really take them seriously.
Linode was one of the big names in being cheap and having an actual vps where you could do whatever. Short of actually buying a rack and the accompanying hardware/networking software (not renting and having your electric/network subsidized) having a vps is the cheapest slickest option to do whatever, part of why I have never bothered with any of the Iaas options. At least AWS blows hard-core in comparison, a lot of the alternatives focus on optimizing some use case, not doing whatever the hell you want.
I'm not sure how you would even compare tailscale, that's focused more on connecting all your boxes e.g. on linode...
Linode
Li Node
Linux Node
Linode hasn’t put themselves out there like other companies. For example, Digital Ocean has all those tutorials that show up in results. Vercel is linked to a hit framework (Next.js). Heroku was a darling linked to Ruby’s community and rode a wave of popularity.
Linode just has… existed for people specifically looking for virtual machines. That’s not a lot of people, relatively
I feel they have been improving little by little throughout the years. I don't remember the exact times when each change happened, but I remember when they introduced hourly pricing, also their $5/month VPS, more variety in the VPSes they offer (GPU-specialized options, high-mem specialized options, etc.), the update of their web interface, etc. I imagine there probably must've also been improvements in their APIs for launching servers, etc. since hourly pricing must've made that useful for automated scaling.
Yes, they're clearly trying to sell cloud services into their enterprise customers.
Because small developers/consultancies have small pockets, and enterprises have large ones.
It makes perfect sense as business strategy.
But it requires understanding that you don't matter to them (you are not the main character of Akamai's story/strategy).
Although it does mean I'll probably need to consider moving clouds myself finally after a decade, because the writing has to pretty much be on the wall at this point that they're not going to want me as a customer...
If anyone has tried to use Akamai for anything without an impressive budget behind them I imagine they can confirm this theory.
Enterprises love long term contracts. Cloud is all about highly-dynamic PAYG. Who does not love long term bulk contracts at [roughly] the price of dynamic PAYG?
edit: it was actually the second trailer in '99
They've been very reliable for me, too. I can't say anything bad about them.
Well, this premise doesn't apply to me, but there are a lot of people in the world, and we are not all the same. From looking at the other comments here, appears I'm not the only one who is new to Akamai.
They kept the name, but killed the product.
Anyway they're probably rebranding because Linode doesn't tell you what it is and they're selling to corporate.
They don't want "What is a Linode and why are we paying so much for it" every invoice, haha
RIP Linode.