Akamai Cloud Computing vs. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

Akamai Connected Cloud Linode would be a good service to host a content delivery network (CDN) because of its edge network but I'd prefer not to use Akamai Connected Cloud Linode for tasks that need GPU power such as Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence (AI) because Akamai Connected Cloud Linode lacks deep GPU compute compared to AWS or Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure

IBM Cloud Bare Metal servers are best suited if you are looking for an alternative for adding computing resources to your organization's IT domain. The costs of owning and maintaining a physical resource in the organization are far more than renting computing resources on the cloud. The bare-metal servers allow you to utilize the entire server for your organization's requirements.

• Many locations of datacenter
• Wide selection of pre-installed applications in the marketplace
• Price is very affordable.
• User interface in the account panel is easy to understand.
• Fast server
• Linode provides tutorials for new users thru Youtube channel.
• Payment is per usage, not monthly.
• Responsive customer service

Incentivized

• Performance - the servers perform really well, even under stress. We have some long build processes running concurrently, and the server [can] serve other applications without any problems.
• Secure - for the most part, the servers are very secure and IBM provides many tools to help [make] sure the servers stay that way.
• Highly Available - while we have experienced various downtimes and outages with other IBM Cloud offerings, so far, we have not experienced any with [IBM Cloud] Bare Metal Servers.

Incentivized

• The (new) 'create custom image' function needs a bit of work before it is useable.
• New accounts have limited features until a support requested is made to turn specific ones on. It would be useful to have an account page that tells you what is disabled so unpleasant surprises are not had at the pointy end of a deadline.
• Stackscripts would be better if it more info was transferred to the script. Eg the Linode Label given, plan requested, etc. But now I am just nit-picking

• Firmware upgrades are not always easy to perform and can be required at unusual time intervals at different datacenters.
• No networking monitoring is available.
• Changes on the IBM side can cause an outage, so you MUST plan for redundancy when building out.

Incentivized

In this eight years of being Linode's customer, there hasn't been a single day we faced problem. Even the migration or maintenance activities have been planned, organised and priorly informed. Kudos to taking care of even such small metrics. Though the instances are unmanaged, the support team helps with relevant document links, or their own articles that help us to fix or solve the issues we face.

Incentivized

Due to cloud computing taking over the market, I have moved to cloud computing. It is so much easier upgrading or downsizing a virtual server on the cloud vs bare metal. I find it way more convenient on cloud computing. The provisioning takes way too long for bare metal servers.

Incentivized

It's pretty easy for me, but I preferred their old interface before it was called 'cloud' (not a computer science term.) The new interface looks easier but I had to ask for help for things I used to be able to find myself. If someone was new to it--without having used their old interface--it might be easier for them than it originally was for me.

Incentivized

There is very little planned downtime. Whenever planned downtime is necessary I'm always given lots of advanced notice and an explanation that I can pass along to my users that they'll understand. I really appreciate that Linode appreciates my commitment to reliable service to my users. It shows that they believe they've been successful when I'm successful.

Incentivized

Servers are well dimensioned and price performant. Of course one always wants more, so if they were to upgrade their hardware for the same price I'd consider moving more workloads. Networking - never had an issue. Hardware speeds - disks are fast and can grow to great size.

Incentivized

Support was excellent and fast. The documentation is extensive and helpful. I learned many things from their online documentation. I did not contact them by phone, but email took a day or less. Complex problems would probably need a service contract. I liked the friendly and polite tone of the support.

Incentivized

Great responsiveness and detailed know-how from the team. Self Explanatory and good resources on the Web to resolve issues. Good communication on issues via email. Good response times on issues which arise and where we have received support from the IBM support team. We believe that IBM is a great Partner to base our IT applications and we believe that a critical infrastructure like a cloud backend will be well served if we continue to base it on IBM.

Incentivized

We got kick started with an initial walkthrough along with some free credits. The initial walkthrough helped us to understand Linode's ecosystem and start our hands on with Linode. We tried out some apps from Marketplace initially with the free credits, which not only helped us understand Linode better, but also those apps. We had implemented many such apps to our customers with Linode

Incentivized

We're a small organization. The implementation of our Linode solution was trivial. Once I justified a cloud server to my bosses over a co-location -- the co-lo wasn't as fast as our linode server in load tests -- it was a matter of moving one Linux implementation to another. Trivial.

Incentivized

The implementation of this software took place as we planned. The performance time taken for full functionality was very reliable with positive results. The customer support team was the best team I have ever met in my career experience. They are always with timely responses when reached to offer any help.

Incentivized

It is more user-friendly than the big three cloud providers like AWS and GCP. The interface blows them out of the water; pricing is so much more competitive—no egregious bandwidth fees like AWS. As a small startup, cutting out the overhead of ultra-complex UI and pricing dramatically helps. It seems to be matched tit-for-tat with DigitalOcean, and their UI is similar in many ways. DigitalOcean has more mature capabilities, even though Linode/Akamai was founded earlier. Linode/Akamai provides better price-per-performance, though, as DigitalOcean is expensive nowadays.

Incentivized

Configured file systems on bare metal servers and was able to increase the size whenever required. Can limit the costs initially to understand the application demand and need. Later, have the flexibility to increase the size of the file system as the application grows bigger and bigger without any hassle.

Incentivized

I completely agree with the above statement. Linode provides the best option in terms of configurations and scalability. We have chosen share CPU instances many times and then moved on with dedicated CPU instances, just with a click of button.

Incentivized

• Over the years, Linode has enabled us to stop maintaining our own server hardware, and leave that up to them.
• On the other hand, Linode provides a bare machine, and requires us to provide almost all of the systems administration effort.

Incentivized

• [I feel] IBM caused significant damages to their acknowledged "gross negligence." [...] [In my opinion,] holding customers/data hostage to limit gross negligence is an extremely poor practice.
• [With my experiences,] our investment was a tremendous loss in time & resources. Their lack of support, [in my opinion,] has caused us to pivot our entire business model and revenue stream. Our product re-launch has been setback by ~18 months due to damages caused by [in my experience, to be] IBM's gross negligence.