As you may recall from this changelog post in 2021, we migrated from the legacy billing system used in our Packet days to our next generation billing system powered by Kill Bill, the open source billing and payments platform. After spending cycles for the last year finishing up these migrations and up-leveling the foundations of the billing platform, we’re pleased to announce the release of some quality-of-life enhancements requested by many of you during the course of this transition:

As always, if you have any questions or feedback to share, don’t hesitate to reach out. Onward!

Recall our Changelog from April: Bye Facilities, Hello (again) Metros

Over the last few years, most users have moved to take advantage of "metros" for supporting things like Location Diversity. To simplify our experience going forward, we will replace the “facility” attribute in the Metal CLI and API with the “metro” attribute, effectively deprecating the facilities concept on our platform.

Changes will be effective on:

If you're still using the facilities in your automation, now is a great time to make the switch to metros! Take a look at the metro docs,facility docs, and be sure take a look at our various projects on Equinix Labs that utilize "metros" as well.

And if you still have questions, hit us up on live chat or support@equinixmetal.com.

If you’re running RHEL 7 or RHEL 8 on your Metal servers, your package updates for those two operating systems will come from a new location starting on May 12, 2023. That’s because we are moving our Red Hat Update Infrastructure cluster to a different data center.

If you’d like to continue receiving those updates, please, download (wget, curl or rpm are your friends) and install the following client packages from the machines running RHEL, before the switchover date:

Questions? Just reach out via the chat bubble or support@equinixmetal.com.

A few years ago we introduced the concept of Metros to abstract the multiple data centers we operate in each region.

Our network is architected to span across all facilities in a metro, which means no matter which facility you're in, the experience (and super low latency) is the same. Think of a metro like an Availability Zone at AWS. This has the added benefit that users can grab inventory from across the entire metro without thinking about individual facilities. Winning!

Over the last few years, most users have moved to take advantage of "metros." To simplify our experience, we will replace the “facility” attribute in the Metal CLI and API with the “metro” attribute, effectively deprecating the facilities concept on our platform.

Changes will be effective on:

If you're still using the facilities in your automation, now is a great time to make the switch to metros! Take a look at the metro docs or the notes on our facility docs, or we'd be happy to connect with you via live chat or support@equinixmetal.com to answer any questions.

Stay tuned here as we get closer to May 30th, for updates and pointers to additional docs.

When it comes to Network Edge locations, more is always better. Today we've opened up not one, but two, more places where you can deploy the VNF of your dreams.

So if you're looking to establish a network presence quickly, easily, and without the need for space, power, or hardware, then we've got you covered. This might be especially interesting if you're already deployed in London, unlocking a truly geo-resilient network infrastructure within the UK market at just a few clicks of a button.

With these two additions, Network Edge is now available in 30 metro locations!

Ethernet Virtual Private LAN (or EVP-LAN) is a multipoint-to-multipoint networking capability that enables users to connect assets — including Network Edge virtual devices — across locations without requiring direct connections between each location. It can be configured in either a regional network setup (e.g. all assets are within a single region) or a global network setup.

If you're looking to connect assets like virtual devices or ports together over a Global WAN without point-to-point connections, this feature is for you!

You can read all about it in the Network Edge docs.

During currently scheduled Network Edge maintenance events, the EVP LAN feature can help customers minimize traffic disruptions by moving to a geo-redundant setup for Bring Your Own Connection traffic (docs).

For folks that prefer a visual reference here is an example topology using EVP-LAN to connect global assets across colocation, Equinix Fabric, and Network Edge:

Hi friends!

It's amazing how 5 years fly by, and yet here we are...good old Ubuntu 18.04 will reach the end of Standard Support on April 30th (details on Canonical's website). After April 30th, Canonical will provide security updates only.

Here's what it means for Equinix Metal, and for folks (we see you!) still rocking 18.04:

Questions? Just reach out via the chat bubble or support@equinixmetal.com.

Happy to kick off 2023 with new versions for two popular Linux distributions. Both are available across our Standard Gen3 fleet today!

Hey team!

For a while there we got a bit stale with one of our favorite operating systems: Flatcar Container Linux. Well, we've remedied that.

For those of you who don't know, we support two Flatcar channels, stable and beta. Both are now updated and released with a nice cadence, which can often be quite rapid.

Throw it at us, Flatcar team, we're ready for ya.

Hip hip hurray!

With the release of our Melbourne (ME) metro into the wild, we're not only completing 12 months worth of builds, but also a milestone in both Australia and Japan: two geographically diverse metros in each country. Shall we call our Aussie regions "AU East" and "AU West"? :-)

Whatever you call it, we've got plenty of m3.small and n3.xlarge's online down under, ready for you to deploy as you start your 2023 journey.