Issues and concerns associated with control as well as full visibility for admins in public cloud solutions are essentially related with security and variable performance of workloads. These problems can be addressed effectively with help of bare-metal cloud services.
Insights into are-metal cloud services
Users of bare-metal cloud services are able to rent and configure servers in a single tenant environment by obviating use of a virtualization layer. This service is a form of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that is designed to empower users by combining security and controls of local servers with scalability and flexibility of cloud servers.
Bare-metal cloud is a perfect solution for workloads that are not able to run on virtualized instances of cloud resulting in need of a plethora of IaaS offerings. These can effectively handle extremely stable workloads with no need of scaling or legacy applications requiring access to physical hardware.
Accessibility of bare-metal cloud services can be compared with VM’s Azure-D series or EC2 of Amazon Web Services. However these services are basically different than bare-metal cloud which maps to physical servers instead of VMs. Absence of server virtualization allows users to exercise direct control and access to server in terms of all its resources that comprise of compute power, in addition to network and storage.]
Bare-metal cloud services can be availed from several providers such as IBM, Internap, Oracle, and Rackspace among others. Interestingly, major providers of public cloud services including Google and Azure have not made their presence felt in this segment with an exception of Amazon Web Services that are offering nearly the same services with Dedicated EC2 Hosts service. This service enables user to control an entire physical server via cloud.
Advantages and downsides of bare-metal cloud
As mentioned earlier, bare-metal cloud service facilitates a direct control of physical server along with all resources. This attribute of bare-metal service makes it far more superior than standard instances of virtualized cloud that are governed with ambiguity of underlying hardware. Since there is no presence of a layer of virtualization, bare-metal cloud eliminates conventional overhead and expenses of hypervisors. This will definitely enhance overall performance.
Multi-tenancy of public cloud services including Infrastructure as a Service is associated with security concerns and compliance related issues. In contrast, bare-metal cloud services are capable of addressing these concerns because clients are provided with hardware platform, which is designed for single tenant use. Regulatory compliance and security is however not guaranteed in bare metal cloud services because of industry’s best practices.
Bare-metal cloud instances are significantly more cost effective as compared to public cloud services due to the fact that users are only accessing the hardware resources. Therefore it is essential to compare expenditure of bare-metal cloud services with on-premise hardware procurement, deployment, and operations.
Bare-metal cloud limits types, sizes, and number of virtualized instances since users are accessing only a single physical server. On the contrary, one can provision multiple virtualized instances by virtualization of a physical server.
Unique attributes of bare-metal cloud management
Management of standard VM instances provisioned by public cloud and that of bare-metal cloud instances are fundamentally different. Major providers of bare-metal cloud services including Oracle and Rackspace allow use of management interfaces that comprise of command line interface and a console.
The web based interface offered by Rackspace enables users to perform wide gamut of functionalities to view and access KPIs, start cloud server, access support functions, and schedule tasks to name a few. Most of the tasks that are facilitated by bare-metal cloud services cannot be even imagined in common VM instances including use of control panels to enable power cycling and server rests.
In spite of this, bare-metal cloud servers demand a highly granular kind of control and management as compared with common instances of cloud services. This issue is addressed by Oracle, which divides bare-metal cloud services into independent entities known as compartments. These are designed to allow isolated instances of cloud to be used by projects or other enterprises.
It is therefore possible to provide data protection and security to individual users of bare-metal cloud services in addition to monitoring, tracking, and management of billing for resources consumed by a group or an activity. More learning may be required for admins that have developed familiarity of managing public cloud instances that are based on VMs.
Relevance of bare-metal cloud services
If the compute demands of any workload are more or less stable, then bare-metal cloud services can be the right fit because of lack of scalability. This means, high end workloads including several I/O intensive workloads in addition to projects that involve machine learning, media encoding, visual rendering, and big data analytics, among others. Workloads such as big data analytics need to be executed on case to case basis and therefore bare-metal cloud services need not be purchased for permanent ownership.
