Linux and Linode

What the industry lacked was a way to make this new computing power accessible to others. While Salesforce, Amazon, and others were building their own cloud environments, the now-ubiquitous Linux open source operating system was claiming its place as the predominant server software in the market.

Jeff Dike, an active Linux contributor, had developed a technology called User-mode Linux. UML allowed developers to create virtual Linux machines within a Linux computer. It was groundbreaking technology and opened the door for the virtualized cloud we know today.

One of those developers was a young technologist, Christopher Aker. He saw an opportunity to use Dike’s hypervisor technology not to build the next Salesforce or Amazon, but to make cloud computing less complicated, less expensive, and more accessible to every developer regardless of where they were located, what their resources were or who they worked for. The company he built — Linode — pioneered cloud computing and, heavily influenced by the open source movement it was born from, remains driven not by profit, but by a larger mission to democratize cloud computing by empowering developers and helping the world innovate.

That mission and belief system — to make things more affordable and accessible to everyone — became the corporate DNA of Linode. Aker knew that certain guiding principles were needed to stay true to that mission. The first was that developer control was paramount, which meant the company had to be built on open standards with a guarantee of "no vendor lock-in". The second was that it had to be customer centric, free to make decisions in the best interests of its customers and not outside investors or shareholders.