Bare Metal

This week brought the release of the latest version of Ubuntu - 18.04 - so read up on the details about the newest LTS release.

The 19th release brings improved Kubernetes support, plus enhanced bare metal & network management.

The blanket statement that bare metal is superior to containers in VMs for running containerized infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, no longer holds true. Each has pros and cons, so the right choice depends heavily on specific workload requirements and operational context. Bare metal was long touted as the obvious choice for organizations seeking both the best compute performance and even superior security when hosting containers compared to VMs. But this disparity in performance has slowly eroded. For security, it is now hard to make the case for bare metal’s benefits over those of VMs, except for very niche use cases.

If bare metal provides the best raw performance, why do hyperscalers still insist on running their own infrastructure on virtual machines? The answer reveals what the companies running the world’s most complex infrastructure really think about cloud architecture.