This is a follow-up to earlier questions I posted to this group on alternatives to AWS for DPDK development. 

From https://news.ycombinator.com/ I was turned on to Equinix from which bare metal boxes are offered. I found they have better hardware for this purpose at less than half the cost. The boxes come with Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx NICs superior to AWS ENA NICs in capability and performance. You can reserve two perfectly good machines for a buck an hour. You're billed by the hour and return them to Equinix at will.

I prepared this instruction set:

https://github.com/rodgarrison/reinvent/blob/ubuntu/doc/equinix_mellanox_setup.md

to give a fairly complete, precise instruction set on how to configure two Equinix machines running DPDK. It deals with all prerequisite setup including the Mellanox driver. In fact, I have not found a single write-up anywhere that pulls together everything in one place.