Imagine this: technology has enabled you to set up more than 100 smart garbage bins across London in the runup to the 2012 Summer Olympics.

These bins greet tourists and locals with up-to-date weather forecasts and the sporting events of the day. But because the small computers inside the bins inevitably fail, you fi nd yourself going to each one of them to manually update the so� ware.

That was the eureka moment for Alexandros Marinos, Pagan Gazzard and Petros Angelatos, who were consulting on the garbage bin project and would later co-found resin.io as a result of this real-world problem. “We have a picture of one of the founders that winter. It was cold, he was wearing gloves, and he’s sitting in one of these garbage cans in the middle of London, SSH-ing in remotely to try and nurse it back to health,” recounts Alison Davis, the company’s director of product marketing and strategy. “And they thought, ‘There has to be a better way to remotely manage fl eets of these kinds of embedded devices.’”

In fact, there was. Docker had recently launched its containerization technology, and the co-founders immediately saw that it could work perfectly with the remote, distributed devices that we have come to call the Internet of Things.

With lightweight so� ware running in a Docker container on these devices, Davis says, “when you want to update your device, all you have to do is swap out for a new Docker container, and you’re good to go.”

By the end of 2013, the resin.io team had ported Docker to an Arm-based chip—the fi rst company to do so—and they began to create a platform to enable users to build, remotely monitor, and manage a fl eet of IoT devices at scale. The platform launched in 2015, and today, resin.io boasts over 100 customers, supporting products ranging from underwater drones and 3D printing to industrial automation and point of sale.

“The Packet team was super helpful in getting things set up, including working with us to deploy a custom kernel built to help with RPI1 compatibility. They were also really good about letting us try out the hardware for quite a long time to make sure it fi t our requirements fully.”

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When the resin.io team discovered that Packet off ered powerful Armv8 servers, they were instantly intrigued by the idea of being able to off er “native” Arm builds, and decided to try it out.

“The Packet team was super helpful in getting things set up, including working with us to deploy a custom kernel built to help with rpi1 compatibility,” says Cameron Diver, maintainer of the resin.io builder. “They were also really good about letting us try out the hardware for quite a long time to make sure it fi t our requirements fully.” The result? Native Arm builds were as much as fi ve times faster than the emulated builds.

Last summer, resin.io moved all of its Arm device builds to Packet—and the upside isn’t just that the builds, at under fi ve minutes, are faster. Davis points out that Packet’s bare metal Arm servers enabled them to address a whole new set of projects: “Applications written in certain languages, such as Rust or Golang, weren’t supported in the emulation tool that we were using before. With native Arm builds, we’re able to handle a much wider set of requirements from our users.” (The company still off ersx86 builds for users with x86 devices who want to use them.)

The switch to Packet has been a positive experience for end users as well as the

resin.io engineers. Says DevOps engineer Jack Brown: “Packet has been a great

provider all around. Their hardware is top-notch, their connectivity is excellent,

and they have a robust yet straight-forward API interface.”

B U I L D A B E T T E R I N T E R N E T ™

Packet is the leading bare metal cloud for developers. Its proprietary technology automates physical servers and networks without the use of virtualization or multi-tenancy–powering over 60k deployments each month in its 20 global datacenters.

Founded in 2014 and based in New York City, Packet has quickly become the provider of choice for leading enterprises, SaaS companies, and so� ware innovators. In addition to its public cloud, Packet’s unique “Private Deployment” model enables companies to automate their own infrastructure in facilities all over the world. Learn more and view other customer stories at www.packet.net.

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