Item: Akamai Connected Cloud
Rating: 10
Author: Harald Kubota

Overall Satisfaction with Linode

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Linode runs for many years all of the infrastructure we need for our web pages and all our public Internet-facing applications. While over the year we used other providers in additions, none were better. It's nice to be able to provision VMs all over the globe, just like we can do with the usual cloud providers, and yet due to their scale, we still feel we get much better and much more personal support when needed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Pricing and pricing structure.
API access and API documentation.
Simple yet effective UI.
Kubernetes offering.

Cons

I'd love to see managed DB capabilities offered.
NodeBalancers are surprisingly expensive compared to VMs.
VPC like GCP does (crossing sites).

Return on Investment

Stability for our Internet-facing services.
Cost savings.
Flexibility to provision a handful of servers temporarily.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute, Google Compute Engine and DigitalOcean Droplets

For simple VMs or Kubernetes, Linode is cheaper and it also has consistently good performance. As long as this is what you need, you get all you'd want.
AWS and GCP shine when you need their other services. Oracle Cloud was bare bone and expensive. Droplets are easy to start with, but get expensive fast.

Support Rating

I only one issue with hardware failing. I got a nice email explaining the situation, what was done (moved my VM, restarted it).
Once predicted hardware failure was expected and again I got a nice email explaining the situation and what will be done, but I had the choice to change the timing if needed.
Once I had a question and it was answered within few hours. And it was not a "we received your email" type response, but the actual answer.
This is top level support. For a cloud provider, this is outstanding.

Other Software Used

Backblaze, Cloudflare, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Compute Engine

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need a VM, or some for running Kubernetes, Linode is my recommended place. You don't get all the bells and whistles the other larger cloud providers offer, but if you don't need those or you don't want those due to lock-in, then you get rock solid performance and great support here.

Using Linode

Usability

Linode is perfect for what it offers: The UI is a great start. Managing DNS is straightforward. The API is simple and well documented. Everything just works. The performance of the VMs is good and global coverage is more than sufficient for me. Private Layer 2 networking is the only feature I miss which would be really adding value.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	Lots to learn

Easy Tasks

DNS management via UI.
Kubernetes with its hosted management plane.
Costing structure.

Difficult Tasks

Layer 2 VLAN.
Regions for Object storage very limited.

Comments

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