I have covered bare metal (BM) servers as a cloud service in previous posts. The accelerating trend I see in 2020 is the demand for BM servers has been witnessing a rapid upswing. This could be because of their integration with the cloud technology ecosystem as well as pricing/customization flexibility. Self-service, zero-touch provisioning and end to end operations automation are going to further significantly expand their appeal across numerous verticals. For instance, in Telco:
Openstack has become an essential choice in these industries both from the perspective of hosting business applications as well as running NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) services. Ironic and bare-metal provisioning becomes especially important from a carrier-grade performance and scalability standpoint. While VNF technology has been dominated by VMs, their successor CNF (Container Network Functions) will likely trend bare metal. As SP’s move into CNF, they should be able to realize all the advantages of containers and bare metal infra – higher density, platform independence, faster DevOps cycles, and increased automation.
Key use cases for BM servers include workloads –
- High-performance applications that need direct access to the underlying hardware. Examples abound in Telco and Banking for instance
- Applications that need real-time or “near real-time” responses
- Data-intensive workloads and analytics workloads
- Edge workloads
Why Cloud Native Technology Will Drive The Service Provider (SP) Market in 2020
How To Select The Right Bare Metal Provisioning Platform
There are a few best practices to consider while deploying software for bare metal provisioning –
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- Consider the topology of the deployment – Bare metal servers have a distinct advantage at the Edge but are also well suited to running in the classical datacenter. I have written extensively about edge computing in this blog and BM shines across all such use cases – http://www.vamsitalkstech.com/?cat=88
- Speed of Provisioning – As we have seen in one of the previous posts (http://www.vamsitalkstech.com/?p=8315), a framework such as OpenStack Ironic provides a unified way of managing virtual machines as well as BM servers using very similar semantics
- Hybrid Cloud Enablement – ensure bare metal servers integrate with other cloud services
- Monitoring – Ease of monitoring BM servers and the workloads on them
- The Ability to run Kubernetes – Bare metal servers should be able to support the running of containers
The Role of Bare Metal deployments in your Enterprise IaaS Journey
Enterprises should follow a “horses for courses” policy and choose the right IaaS technology. As can be seen from the above, a lot of these decisions will be driven by the needs of the application themselves. As such targeted proof of concepts can help with choosing the right platform as appropriate for the workload.