Equinix Triples Investment in Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Equinix​, the world's largest data center & colocation provider, announced it has tripled its investment in the cloud native community with an expanded commitment to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Community Infrastructure Lab (CIL). Innovators from throughout the CNCF community can now access up to USD$1 Million of powerful on-demand infrastructure resources per year across Equinix's global footprint.

The CIL was established in 2017 by Packet (acquired by Equinix in March 2020) with an initial monthly commitment of free bare metal infrastructure for open source and community projects. Since its founding, the Lab has provided short- and long-term resources to dozens of well-known open source community projects, including Longhorn, CoreDNS, Fluentd, Linkerd, Prometheus and Falco. The CIL has also been used extensively for scale testing and performance work by Red Hat (Deploying 2048 Openshift Nodes) and Vitess (Continuous Performance Testing), and is where the CNF Testbed and the CNCF.ci projects live.

The growth of the cloud native community has resulted in increased demand for the CIL. With a focus on building ecosystems and providing interconnected digital infrastructure, Equinix Metal  provides a uniquely neutral, open environment for cloud native development. Equinix Metal does not impose multitenancy, virtualization or an overlay network by default, enabling users to bring the tooling of their choice and to accurately develop for hybrid and edge environments.

CIL participants can leverage all Equinix Metal features, including both x86 (Intel and AMD) and Arm (Ampere) infrastructure.

"Everyone is invited to apply and join other digital leaders in advancing open source and hybrid cloud innovation on the CNCF CIL. We believe that open source innovation on specialized, software-defined bare metal infrastructure is the key to unlocking the potential of hybrid and multicloud architectures. Our investment in the CNCF's CIL demonstrates our commitment to the cloud native and open source communities at large. We hope you join us," Zachary Smith, Managing Director, Bare Metal, Equinix said.