2019: A Big Year of Innovation for Linode and a Big Thank You to Our Customers

Our overarching mission as a company is helping our customers innovate faster. To do that, we need to innovate fast ourselves. And in 2019 that’s exactly what we did. The past 12 months saw us launch a record number of new products and services, open three new data centers, and accelerate on our promise to make the cloud simpler, more affordable, and more accessible to everyone.

This pace of innovation plays into a trend we saw emerging as the year played out. We’ve reached the point in the evolution of cloud computing where core products and services — what our industry calls primitives — have reached parity across infrastructure providers. This means developers, small businesses, and enterprises now have options beyond the Big 3 for the workloads they deploy to the public cloud. It’s a new segment of the market 451 Research is calling the alternative cloud movement. Our pioneering role in the cloud, together with our industry-leading price performance and independence, position us to lead this evolving and critically important category.

We wanted to take you through some of the highlights from 2019 (and there were many):

COMPUTE

Dedicated compute instances for CPU-intensive workloads
We kicked off 2019 with the introduction of Dedicated CPU instances to help our customers avoid contention on resources and run CPU-intensive workloads at 100% capacity. After a few short months of availability, we more than doubled the storage included with these plans to celebrate our 16th birthday.

On-demand GPU instances featuring the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000
Complex applications like machine learning and AI, graphics rendering and video transcoding are faster and more efficient with a GPU. We launched on-demand GPU instances featuring the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000. This powerful card is being offered for the first time in the cloud, at a price that’s more accessible to the developer community.

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KUBERNETES

Fully managed Kubernetes, making containerized workloads even easier
Our customers are taking steps to further the adoption of Kubernetes by deploying container orchestration at scale. We launched the beta for our Linode Kubernetes Engine, designed to be the easiest, fully-managed container orchestration platform for deploying and managing modern applications in the cloud.

Deploy Linodes from Rancher version 2.3
Rancher is a popular tool for teams to adopt and manage Kubernetes in their workflows. We partnered with Rancher to support our customers using the tool, and with the 2.3 release made the activation of a Linode node driver the default. This gives customers the ability to deploy clusters on Linode without any additional configuration.

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STORAGE

Simple, affordable, S3 compatible Object Storage
Storage for Linode customers significantly improved in 2018 with the release of Block Storage, and this year’s addition of S3-compatible, highly available, and easily scalable Object Storage. In response to feedback, we also increased our storage limits to 50TB and 50 million objects per cluster.

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DATA CENTERS

Linode now spans 11 geographic regions around the world with the launch of our new data centers in India, Australia, and Canada.  Customers who need to deploy workloads in these markets will enjoy reduced latency and improved performance while satisfying data sovereignty requirements. 

India market launch with new Linode Mumbai data center
India is one of the world’s fastest-growing regions for technology. Linode India supports the more than 5 million software developers in the country advancing personal and business projects by giving them a simple and affordable alternative to the major hyperscale providers.

Australia market launch with new Linode Sydney data center 
Opening our data center in Sydney, Australia was a big one for our customers, many of which had been using our Singapore or Fremont data centers to manage their cloud infrastructure. 

Canadian market launch with new Linode Toronto data center
Toronto is home to nearly one-third of Canada’s developer community. So when we looked to expand our global footprint, launching a data center among Toronto’s most vibrant technology community was an easy decision. 

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NETWORKING

Half-price NodeBalancers to make the cloud more accessible
NodeBalancers are the workhorses of the cloud, managing the scale and workload distribution of traffic to your Linodes. For our 16th birthday this year, we permanently cut the price of NodeBalancers in half, from $20 to $10.

Built-in network-layer protection with Advanced DDoS
As we’ve expanded our global infrastructure, we’ve also added resources to help protect customers from DDoS attacks. Over the past 12 months, we continued to build out this advanced protection technology to mitigate attempts to overwhelm your applications with large-volume traffic, causing them to become overloaded and unavailable for legitimate users.

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ONE-CLICK APPS

Accelerate deployments with new One-Click Apps
One-Click Apps make it as easy as possible to deploy fully-configured applications in the cloud. We added a number of apps to our growing One-Click library, including WordPress, GitLab, cPanel, Plesk, and Minecraft. 

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PROGRAMS

Linode’s New Solutions Partner Program
For the past 16 years, our partners have helped thousands of companies around the world build their businesses in the cloud. We launched the Linode Solutions Partner Program to bring the world’s most popular independent cloud to even more organizations and help our partner community drive more revenue.

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OUR GIFT TO YOU

Reduction in Linode transfer fees from $0.02 to $0.01 
Starting today, we’ve reduced our transfer overage price to $0.01. It’s another way we’re simplifying the cloud in a market where transfer often isn’t included and costs aren’t predictable. At Linode, inbound transfer is always free and outbound is the only thing we charge for.

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2020 ROADMAP

If you thought 2019 was exciting, wait until you see what we have cooking for 2020.  Here is just a small sample of what we have planned:

• NodeBalancer automatic Let’s Encrypt support
• NodeBalancer PROXY protocol support
• Instantaneous DNS Manager updates
• Marketplace for One-Click Kubernetes and single instance apps
• Linode Kubernetes Engine global availability
• Bare Metal machines with cloud infrastructure management
• Managed Databases for production-ready DBs
• Cloud Firewall to control network traffic to your Linodes
• Per customer network VLAN
• Anycast Network for improved routing
• New data centers to continue supporting global markets
• Multi-language support for Linode docs & guides including Spanish, German, Portuguese, Japanese and more

We are immeasurably grateful to every developer, company and organization who entrusted us with their business in 2019. We’ve set aggressive goals for 2020 and look forward to rising to the challenge.