How a Hardware Company Supports Open Source

Equinix is not a typical contributor to the world of open
source software. Organized as a real estate investment
trust, it operates digital infrastructure around the globe,
keeping computing systems powered on and cooled in
oer 250 data centers.
Ed will describe the current Equinix open source program's origins at
Packet, an infrastructure-as-a-service company acquired
by Equinix in 2020. The pioneering Works on Arm program
brought bare metal access to the then-new arm64 server
platform, and welcomed developers to port their software
and tools to that architecture at a time when these servers
were scarce.
The talk will cover lessons learned from a multi-year bootstrapping
process to bring arm64 to the data center. From programming
languages to build tools to optimization techniques, Ed will
discuss the crucial role that access to bare metal hardware at
scale makes in enabling software development to succeed.