I just now took a look at Packet's web site and their data center locations. They categorize each location as either "core" or "edge", but I couldn't find anything to indicate what those terms mean in this context. Are you familiar with that distinction?

The location nearest me is an "edge", not a "core". I wonder what I would be missing out on, if it's not "core".

Edge DCs only have one type of machine (1E) and no block storage, but I think are otherwise the same.

Even in core DCs though the availability of different types of machines varies.

Love packet.net btw -- the bgp stuff is really game changing.

mcrae covered this well, but to add to that, the Edge servers are targeted for low latency services close to users, think self driving cars, IOT, adtech, etc. You can see more details at https://www.packet.net/edge/ and https://www.packet.net/blog/looking-over-the-edge/.

Also a happy Packet customer. We use their small instances for things like service monitoring (where VM pauses cause false positives) and for routing infrastructure where bare metal is required to achieve VoIP-acceptable jitter. They’re also one of the few cloud hosting providers to support BGP.

Scaleway.com also offers baremetal servers at a really attractive price. The CLI is just awesome, it's great to see other cloud providers joining the game.

it's just a lot harder to automate reliably without any form of userdata.

packet.net I do coreos and provision with userdata specifying what docker image to run... that's all it takes to have immutable deployment :)

... not really, it just requires different infrastructure/systems.

You end up having to build your own moving parts...

Building a high-availability metadata store is not easy. And ensuring that incoming request IPs aren't spoof is a little non-trivial to reason about.

UserData is a good way to provide a one-time token that can be used to fetch data...

Using SSH for provisioning is just plain dirty... and almost impossible to do reliably... You'll need global locks and timeouts to recover in case one of your master crashes... Plus some garbage collection to cleanup things that where not fully provisioned.

This is a LOT of unreliable state to manage. And ton of corner cases. Having the right architecture matters for reliable automation.