VyOS on Equinix Network Edge: Run VyOS 1.5 LTS as a Network Virtual Appliance across Equinix Metros
We've had a lot of conversations with network architects over the past couple of years, and the same tension comes up almost every time. Businesses need to move faster: spin up new regions, connect to more clouds, and respond to a partner request without a six-week hardware procurement cycle. But they're still carrying the consequences of earlier vendor lock-in decisions and aren't eager to repeat them.
That tension is exactly what brought VyOS and Equinix together. And when you layer in the Pay-As-You-Go model that governs how VyOS runs on Equinix Network Edge, the combination starts to look less like a product decision and more like a more flexible operating model for modern enterprise networking.
The Old Model Was Built for a Different World
Traditional enterprise networking forced a familiar trade-off. You committed CAPEX to a hardware platform years in advance, locked into a vendor's upgrade cycle, paying per feature, per tunnel, per VPN user as your needs grew. That model made sense when your infrastructure was static. It doesn't make sense when you're routing workloads across multiple clouds and spinning up new regions in response to business opportunities rather than IT planning cycles.
The good news is that the infrastructure industry has caught up. Equinix Network Edge and VyOS together are a strong example of what a more adaptable model can look like in practice.
What Pay-As-You-Go Really Changes
Equinix Network Edge lets you deploy virtual routers and firewalls as software directly on Equinix's global infrastructure, across 240+ data centers in 71 major metros, with direct on-ramps to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The billing is genuinely elastic: charged by VNF size in CPUs, with a minimum of one day. No early termination fees on month-to-month. Deprovision a device, and billing stops. You only pay for the days it ran.
VyOS follows the same logic on the software side. No per-bandwidth fees, no per-tunnel pricing, no per-user caps. Your subscription covers the software regardless of how many BGP peers you bring up or WireGuard tunnels you run. What you pay scales with the infrastructure you actually consume, not with licensing metrics that expand independently of underlying resource use.
That alignment between infrastructure cost and software cost is genuinely unusual in enterprise networking. Most vendors in this space built their pricing to grow with you in ways that have little to do with actual resource consumption. This is different, and it matters more than it might seem at first glance.
What It Looks Like in Practice
A typical scenario we see: an enterprise wants private connectivity to multiple clouds across multiple regions, without routing everything through a central data center. On Equinix Network Edge, you deploy a VyOS VNF in your primary metro, establish BGP sessions to AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect over Equinix Fabric, and bring up a redundant node covered by a 99.999% availability SLA. When you need a new region, you repeat the process in minutes. When a project wraps up, you deprovision. You were billed for the days those nodes ran, nothing more.
The operational consistency adds up too. VyOS runs identically on bare metal, hypervisors, public cloud, and Network Edge. Same CLI, same automation tooling, same runbooks for your team. As your footprint grows across environments, that consistency compounds into real efficiency gains that are hard to put a number on but impossible to ignore once you've experienced the alternative.
The Honest Pricing Argument
It is worth stating clearly: per-tunnel and per-user licensing in network software rarely reflects the actual cost of delivering the service. The resource cost of running an additional VPN tunnel is often negligible. Charging per tunnel is typically a commercial licensing mechanism, not a model that maps cleanly to real infrastructure consumption.
Pay-as-you-go, charged per CPU per day with no lock-in, is a more transparent model. You pay for what the network function actually consumes. VyOS's subscription follows the same principle. Together on Equinix Network Edge, you get an architecture where the economics are finally aligned with how networks actually grow and change.
If you want to see it firsthand, Equinix offers a no-obligation 14-day trial. We're happy to work through your specific architecture alongside you.
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