Packet: Baremetal Infrastructure with Zachary Smith and Nathan Goulding

Cloud infrastructure is usually consumed in the form of virtual machines or containers. These VMs or containers are running on a physical host machine that is also running other VMs and containers. This is called multitenancy. Servers across cloud providers such as AWS have a high utilization because there are multiple virtual instances running on each physical server host.

Cloud computing has led to a low cost of compute infrastructure. But in some cases, this low cost comes at the price of not being able to control the underlying hardware with as much precision as the user would want. Some users want specific types of hardware. Other users want to be using dedicated hardware that does not risk the “noisy neighbor” problem of sharing a physical server with some other application that is using most of the resources.

Packet is a company that provides remote access to baremetal infrastructure. The user experience is similar to that of a cloud provider, but with more control over how a given physical host will be used. Zachary Smith is the CEO of Packet and Nathan Goulding is the chief architect. Zach and Nathan join the show to talk about the business and the engineering behind Packet, as well as the future goals for where they want to take the company.

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Transcript

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