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Alpine Linux Turns Equinix Metal Exit Into an Infrastructure Upgrade
Quoting: Alpine Linux Turns Equinix Metal Exit Into an Infrastructure Upgrade - FOSS Force —
When the data center REIT Equinix announced in November 2024 that it would be shuttering its bare‑metal IaaS platform Equinix Metal in June 2026, a small army of bare-metal cloud vendors began romancing Equinix’s customers. However, while cash paying customers were being wooed with promises of easy and cheap migration paths, not-for-profit open source projects that Equinix had been hosting pro bono were left in the lurch.
Most notably, this led to the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation shutting down its Community Cluster and Community Infrastructure Lab at the end of 2025. These projects offered free large-scale bare-metal access to projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and others, that otherwise couldn’t have afforded that kind of capacity.
Also notable was Alpine Linux, the small-footprint security-focused Linux distribution that’s often embedded in devices or used in containers as a base image. During the course of the last decade or so, the project had become dependent on donated Equinix Metal services that it used for a variety of purposes, including maintaining its T1 mirrors and for building and testing packages.