Linode, LLC () is an American

cloud hosting Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multip ...

provider that focuses on providing

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

powered

virtual machines In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

to support a wide range of applications. It was acquired by

Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery networkJ. Dilley, B. Maggs, J. Parikh, H. Prokop, R. Sitaraman, and B. Weihl. (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Inte ...

on March 21, 2022. Back in 2003, at the time of its launch, Linode was considered ahead of its time with virtualization hosting. It has grown into a multinational corporation serving more than 800,000 customers from 196 countries. Linode server locations are optimized for serving a global audience in terms of reducing latency and improving UX.

History

Linode (a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsLinux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics *Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines, ...

) was founded by Christopher Aker, launching in mid 2003. Aker is a graduate of

Full Sail University Full Sail University is a Private university, private For-profit higher education in the United States, for-profit university in Winter Park, Florida. It was formerly a recording studio in Ohio named Full Sail Productions and Full Sail Center ...

in Florida. Linode transitioned from

UML The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

Xen Xen (pronounced ) is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory an ...

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

in March 2008, and then to KVM in mid-2015. It launched its

data backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", w ...

service in 2009. NodeBalancer, a load-balancing service, launched in July 2011. Linode released Linode Managed, an

incident response An incident is an event that could lead to loss of, or disruption to, an organization's operations, services or functions. Incident management (IcM) is a term describing the activities of an organization to identify, analyze, and correct hazards ...

service designed for businesses, in 2013. Linode opened its first data centers in Fremont, and

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

in 2003. It subsequently opened its regions in

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...

in 2007,

Newark Newark most commonly refers to: * Newark, New Jersey, city in the United States * Newark Liberty International Airport, New Jersey; a major air hub in the New York metropolitan area Newark may also refer to: Places Canada * Niagara-on-the ...

in 2008,

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

in 2009,

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

in 2011 and 2016,

Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...

and

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

in 2015, and

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

, and

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

in 2019. Linode moved its headquarters to

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

in 2018. On February 15, 2022,

announced that they will be acquiring Linode for approximately $900 million. It was acquired on March 21,2022.

Products and services

Its

flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the fi ...

products are cloud-hosting services with multiple packages at different price points. As of November 2019, Linode offers five kinds of computing services geared towards specific needs of the customers like high memory requirements, dedicated CPU, or GPU, or general purpose usage. Linode Block Storage allows users to extend their server storage capacity with volumes on demand. Linode Backup allows customers to backup their servers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Linode Manager and NodeBalancer both allow users to manage multiple server instances across a single system. In September 2013, Linode launched Longview, an analysis package for Linux. Linode launched its S3-Compatible Object Storage service in late October 2019 to enable customers to store large unstructured data. On November 11, 2019, at CNCF KubeCon, Linode announced the availability of its managed

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

engine service.

Compute

* ''Linode Kubernetes Engine'' (LKE) -

containers as a service application. * GPU - On-demand cloud

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

(Graphical Processing Unit) compute configurations for parallel processing workloads such as machine learning, scientific computing, and video processing. * Dedicated CPU - Dedicated CPU instances run on their own CPU cores in the Linode infrastructure. No sharing the processor with other customers. * High Memory - High Memory compute configurations to run memory-intensive applications. * Shared Linodes - A balanced compute configuration for a wide range of cloud applications. * Nanode - $5/month entry level compute package to run a fully functioning

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

Storage

* Linode Object Storage - Highly available and scalable S3-Compatible

object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data as ...

to store

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...

. * Linode Block Storage -

Block storage In computing (specifically data transmission and data storage), a block, sometimes called a physical record, is a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a maximum length; a ''block size''. Data thu ...

to store data in volumes, or blocks, which act as individual hard disk drives (HDD). * Linode Backups - Automatic data

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", w ...

service.

Networking

* VPC -

Virtual private cloud A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as ''users'' hereafter) using th ...

for managing the software defined network of cloud resources. * VLAN -

Virtual local area network A virtual local area network (VLAN) is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer (OSI layer 2).IEEE 802.1Q-2011, ''1.4 VLAN aims and benefits'' In this context, virtual, refers to a physi ...

* DDoS Protection - Detection and mitigation of distributed denial-of-service (

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host A ...

) infrastructure attacks. * NodeBalancers - Software-defined, managed service for load balancing the traffic. * DNS Manager - Managed Domain Name System (

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

) service on Linode infrastructure. * Next Generation Network - Linodes modern worldwide network infrastructure which interconnects global data centers via a private fiber backbone.

Management tools

* Cloud Manager - A user- and mobile-friendly interface to deploy and manage Linode virtual machines, configure networking, and control user accounts. * Linode API -

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

(Application Programming Interface) for programmatic access to the Linode platform. * Linode CLI -

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

(Command Line Interface) account access from for managing Linode infrastructure. * Images - Create customer Linux images to make scaling easier. * StackScripts - Automatically customize Linode infrastructure deployments with StackScripts. * Monitoring - Analyze infrastructure performance, track transfer usage, and create custom alerts.

Professional services

* Managed - An incident response service to help businesses cut out costly downtime. * Professional Services - Cloud consulting to help you architect your services, carry out site migrations, and deploy software.

Awards

Linode is a recipient of the Stevie Award for Sales and Customer Service. In 2019, Linode was awarded a Top Workplaces honor by

The Philadelphia Inquirer ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The newspaper's circulation is the largest in both the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley metropolitan region of Southeastern Pennsy ...

. Linode’s headquarters building received the 2019 Grand Jury Award from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. The building, built-in 1902, is a Philadelphia landmark, named on Philadelphia’s registrar of historic places, and was once an MTV Real World house.

Global network

Linode operates 11 data centers around the world, connected by the company’s

Next Generation Network The next-generation network (NGN) is a body of key architectural changes in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind the NGN is that one network transports all information and services (voice, data, and all sorts of med ...

and extensive peering arrangements.

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

is fully enabled on all of Linode’s supported operating systems and free

protection is included on all of the company’s virtual machines.

Regions and data centers

As of Q2 2020, Linode Cloud is available in 11 regions leveraging 11 Data Centers. A region is a specific geographical location where users can deploy cloud resources.

Security incidents

The accounts of eight Linode customers that held

Bitcoin Bitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distr ...

electronic currency were compromised in March 2012. Roughly 40,000 bitcoins were stolen. Hack The Planet (HTP) accessed Linode's

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...

s in 2013. The group exploited a technical vulnerability in Adobe's

ColdFusion Adobe ColdFusion is a commercial rapid web-application development computing platform created by J. J. Allaire in 1995. (The programming language used with that platform is also commonly called ColdFusion, though is more accurately known as CF ...

application server An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a ...

. Linode said that HTP could not decrypt any financially sensitive information and reset all account passwords. Linode announced plans to introduce two-step authentication for its services in May 2013. Starting Christmas Day 2015 and continuing until January 10th, Linode was hit by large and frequent

attacks, which were being caused by a "bad actor" purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to significantly damage Linode's business. Linode was the victim of another severe DDoS attack over the 2016 Labor Day weekend.

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.linode.com Cloud infrastructure Cloud computing providers Web services Companies based in Philadelphia Companies established in 2003 Internet hosting 2022 mergers and acquisitions