With Equinix Metal headed for shutdown, Alpine Linux has secured fresh backing from regional cloud and hosting providers, emerging with more diverse and resilient infrastructure than before.
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.
This sent the 20-year-old project scrambling to line up new bare‑metal sponsors and hosting partners to replace core infrastructure it was losing that wasn’t within its budget to replace. The situation was dire enough to prompt the organization in February to sound something of an alarm on its website:
“To continue providing Alpine Linux as a reliable, secure, and efficient operating system, we need your help. If you or your organization can assist with hosting resources or financial contributions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.”
Good News and More Good News
It went on to say that it needed to find funding for colocation space, bare-metal servers, and virtual machines and appealed to Alpine Linux users to make donations.
The good news is that Alpine Linux’s call for help didn’t go unheeded. On Sunday, the organization announced that it’s turned things around and that it’s again on strong financial footing:
“In the weeks following our announcement, numerous organisations contacted us with offers of help from high-bandwidth servers, to colocation space, to fully managed compute resources. We are grateful to every organisation that reached out. Your support shows how widely Alpine Linux is used and how deeply the project matters to the open-source world.”
More good news comes from the fact that the project’s additional funding needs aren’t being met by individual donors, who can be unpredictable, but by businesses — mostly focused on open source — who stand to gain merely from Alpine Linux’s survival because their businesses depend on the distribution.
Who Anted Up?
Alpine Linux is listing its newfound sponsors under two categories: Tier-1 Mirror Sponsors, and CI and Infrastructure Resource Sponsors. I’m listing them here, because when companies step up to the plate for open source projects, that’s good to know info for open source supporters.
From the Tier-1 Mirror Sponsors list:
- Osso B.V.: This is a small Netherlands-based company that focuses on open source hosting, managed Kubernetes, and high-availability multi–data center setups for ISPs, SaaS providers, and tech startups. They’ll be supplying Alpine with “server capacity and connectivity close to Alpine’s core team”
- NETMOUNTAINS Group GmbH: A Germany-based data center and cloud company, NETMOUNTAINS Group has six data centers in Germany, one in Finland, and another in the US. According to Alpine, it’s offering “bandwidth and dependable hosting capacity out of Germany, improving central European distribution.”
- Cherry Servers: You could call this company Equinix Metal Ultra Lite and it’ll be a key infrastructure provider for Alpine going forward. It’s a Lithuanian‑based bare-metal cloud provider, with a small number of points of presence in Europe, the US, and Asia. Alpine says it’ll be providing bare-metal servers and a lot of bandwidth “for a project that pushes hundreds of terabytes per month.”
- HorizonIQ: Like Cherry Servers, this one’s a bare-metal cloud outfit with company‑controlled and partner sites in North America, EMEA, and APAC, including facilities in Germany, Romania, the Netherlands, and the UK. It’s more of a concierge rather than a DIY service, which could make it invaluable to Alpine, as it brings top‑tier hardware to the table, including Intel Xeon Gold, AMD EPYC, and NVMe SSDs, as well as remote hands — doing away with the need to have staff available at every remote location.
Under the second heading of CI and Infrastructure Resource Sponsors are three new partners to help support the project’s continuous integration runners, development systems, and general infrastructure workloads:
- i3D.net: Owned by the French video game publisher Ubisoft, this global low-latency networker offers a hybrid bare‑metal plus multi‑cloud model that can roll into Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform during traffic spikes. It started out with a focus on gaming, but has lately been positioning itself as a specialized enterprise infrastructure. Its customer base includes Discord, Massive Entertainment, Psyonix, and others. Alpine says it will help accelerate CI and development workflow performance.
- Cloudon: This is part of CloudHubs, a Canada‑based multicloud management and platform provider that utilizes more than 20 public, private, and hybrid clouds rather than running its own bare-metal fleet. It’s focused on AI‑driven multicloud cost and operations management, migration, and failover, and allows customers to manage apps across multiple clouds with a pane-of-glass dashboard approach.
- Scaleway: This is a France‑based cloud provider that positions itself as a European alternative to US hyperscalers, and which is actively involved in the EU’s digital sovereignty efforts. It looks like Scaleway will be providing CI infrastructure so that Alpine can keep its RISC‑V support work from overloading its more mainstream platforms, by running riscv64 jobs on dedicated resources and reducing waiting times.
A Better Positioned Alpine
According to Alpine, migration is already underway to these new infrastructures. We can surmise — given that Equinix has told its paying customers that they can continue to use Equinix Metal until June 30th, that the same or something similar also applies to Alpine Linux.
It also appears that once the dust has settled, Alpine will be better off because of an increased amount of resources available for mirrors, CI, and development — and because they will no longer be relying on the goodwill of a single sponsor.
“What began as a major risk to the project has become an opportunity to build a more redundant and future-proof infrastructure,” the project said. “This marks an important step forward in ensuring Alpine Linux remains secure, fast, and dependable for millions of users and downstream systems.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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