Back to the Metal

Bare metal is BACK!

For years virtualization has absolutely dominated the cloud market. The market for virtualization is still 10x larger than bare metal ($8B USD vs $100B USD). But now consumers are demanding MORE for their workloads.

• More power
• Better performance
• Control
• Cost efficiency

… and the signal from the data suggest that this trend isn't going away anytime soon.

If we look a bit deeper, we might see another story enabling the avalanche of (re) adoption in bare metal. A maturing ecosystem of tools and platforms making what was once considered a technological burden, more approachable than ever!

Numbers Tell the Story

According to Grand View Research, the global bare metal cloud market was valued at USD 8.44 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 36.5 billion by 2030, growing at a 23.9% CAGR. A more conservative (and shorter timeframe) look from, MarketsandMarkets forecasts growth from USD 8.5 billion in 2023 to USD 19.1 billion by 2028, with a 17.4% CAGR over that period.

The absolutely MASSIVE elephant in the room here is that these numbers don't even include the fact that 83% of enterprises plan to repatriate workloads (something our own Konner Bemis talked about in a recent blog post).

Regardless of the repatriation movement, at the surface the growth for bare metal cloud has been mainly attributed to:

• High-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads that demand predictable, low-latency performance.
• Edge computing, where compute needs to be closer to the data, without the virtualization bloat.
• A growing focus on cost control for steady-state workloads, where multi-tenant cloud economics no longer add up.

But engineers and organizations have always been pushing the barrier on performance, edge, consistency, and cost. So why, until recently, has bare metal not been the belle of the ball?

Why Bare Metal Has Been Hard (Until Now)

Bare metal has historically had an image problem... and it was somewhat well deserved.

Deploying to physical infrastructure in the era of cloud virtual machines wasn't always appealing. Users faced several obstacles:

• More manual provisioning
• Minimal abstraction
• More accurate up front planning

Why invest in all this when at the press of a button you can have a VM pop up in minutes?

And at the same time, our industry also moved through the containers revolution. One might think that containers would have been the start of a move back toward bare metal. However, this was stifled by leading tools like Kubernetes.

Kubernetes promised to abstract infrastructure altogether, but in reality, almost everyone that adopted it was forced into some managed service offering like EKS, AKS, or GKE to deal with the platform's inherent complexity. As a result, the freedom we were promised was ripped away and stored just out of reach as most organizations found themselves locked deeper into dependency on the managed cloud service ecosystem.

And if you don't believe that coming from me at Cycle, a direct Kubernetes alternative, then listen to Red Hat in their market trends overview. For two straight years (2023 and 2024), they reported organizations being slowed down by Kubernetes-related issues.

LowOps and Simple Bare Metal

So where does that leave us?

For teams that are focused on optimizing for performance, control, cost efficiency, and the handful of other benefits that bare metal carries, bare metal has always made sense.. but the tooling hasn't. Until now.

The shift is: bare metal doesn't have to feel so bare.

Modern platforms like Cycle have native support for bare metal. The experience is the same as spinning up any other server node, no extra steps or configuration. It's just a simple, clean deployment.

This is LowOps:

• No YAML
• No IaC spaghetti
• No Kubernetes (or Docker)
• Just infrastructure that works

LowOps isn't geared toward rigidity, it's about eliminating the friction. We provide the building blocks and you get full control, predictable performance, and zero bloat.

Bare Metals Unfinished Story

This is the part of the movie where a rock ballad comes on and we see a bare metal montage. Bare metal isn't just back, it's got unfinished business.

For years, it sat in the background. Too complex, too manual, "old school" as teams were caught up in the wave of virtualization and managed services. But now things have changed.

With tools like Cycle that make using bare metal indistinguishable from virtual machines, and a renewed movement for organizations demanding control, performance, and cost efficiency, the story has fully shifted.

If you've been thinking about trying bare metal but still aren't sure about managing the lift, come check out Cycle and give bare metal a shot today!

💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!