Infrastructure management isn't about taking sides. Too often, teams get pulled into “X is better than Y” debates that miss the bigger picture: your compute stack should serve your needs, not industry hype.
A common decision point in the past has been the choice between bare metal or cloud hyperscalar virtualization. Nowadays, the answer isn't 1 or 0. To get the strategy right, you'll need to understand where we've come from, what the cloud has offered (and taken away), and where the industry is headed next.
A Quick History
When it comes to infrastructure management the history is rather straightforward . Everything started with bare metal. Most organizations owned servers, ran their workloads directly on top of them, and managed every layer of the stack.
As time passed, technology evolved which offered two MAJOR changes:
- Physical servers shrank dramatically - The size of each “box” became orders of magnitude smaller, making modern data centers feasible.
- Hardware became cheaper - CPUs, RAM, and disk storage followed a rapid decline in cost, allowing more compute per dollar.
Traditional hardware scaling was victim to long refresh cycles and hard-to-predict hardware usage. And so, because businesses needed faster, more flexible access to compute and wanted to buy based on usage, the cloud was born.
The cloud promised (and delivered):
- Faster deployment times
- Global reach
- Lower upfront costs
- On-demand scaling
But it also introduced:
- Opaque pricing
- Vendor lock-in
- Less control
- Significant markups over time
Over time, this was a model that absolutely dominated (for good reason). Now, 20 years or so into the cloud, we're seeing a renewed resurgence toward bare metal. The main difference? It doesn't always have to be on-prem. You can use the same cloud usage model with bare metal cloud providers OR run those same types/brands of servers in a co-location and, if you really want, manage your own locations.
As the gap between the market for virtualization and bare metal shrinks, now is a great time to look at when each of these is the right choice.
When is Bare Metal the Right Choice?
Are performance, predictability, security, and control non-negotiable? You might gain quite a bit by adopting bare metal into your infrastructure.
Let's take a closer look at where bare metal can have a big impact.
Performance: Virtualization Overhead Is Real
All virtual machines run on a hypervisor layer. Part of what this layer does is emulate hardware. While there are now very efficient hypervisors (KVM, Hyper‑V), there's always some cost. The places most impacted are:
- CPU-bound workloads: Virtualization intercepts privileged instructions, introducing latency.
- I/O operations: Virtual disk and network layers abstract real hardware, leading to slower disk access and increased packet processing time.
The typical range of overhead on performance is between 2% and 10%, but that number can change based on the workload running on the virtualized node. If hypervisor load itself spikes, downstream performance can degrade as well.
On bare metal, software runs directly on the server. There's no virtualization to account for, so performance is better and more predictable. With the major rise of AI and high-performance computing workloads, it's no wonder so many teams are adding bare metal to their compute stack.
Cloud Markup and Long-Term Cost
The cloud offers maximum flexibility and usage-based pricing, but that flexibility carries a premium over longer-term bare metal servers.
Chistadata found that:
The bare metal server costs roughly one-fourth of the AWS EC2 instance for similar storage and RAM. The AWS gp2 storage has an IOPS limit (3,000 IOPS for < 1 TB and up to 16,000 IOPS for up to 16 TB). So increasing the IOPS could increase costs further.
And that's before you add things like:
- Egress fees
- Premium for storage IOPS
- Support contracts
- Redundant service costs (e.g., cloud firewalls vs built-in security groups)
Flexibility
If you've been around for a while or have experience with bare metal, “flexibility” might seem odd. But modern bare metal offerings are highly flexible.
On Cycle, users can deploy containers and nested VMs side by side on bare metal nodes. That means you get raw performance plus the ability to run VMs alongside your containers.
When to Use Virtualization
Bare metal is making a comeback, but virtualization remains incredibly useful. Virtualization is more flexible in resource shape, available in more global locations, and has become highly performant.
So when should your organization consider virtualization?
Legacy Workloads
VMs offer incredible support for legacy workloads that may need:
- A specialized kernel
- Older packages or runtimes
- Intricate process management
Containers don't virtualize the kernel—VMs do.
Isolation as Resource Ownership
VMs get dedicated resource slices:
- RAM and CPU pinned by the hypervisor
- Own kernel and device drivers
- Run like a physical machine, not a namespaced process
That full virtualization provides deterministic performance, full root control, and stronger security boundaries than containers.
Be Strategic
Bare metal offers raw power, predictability, cost efficiency, and stronger security. Cloud-based virtualization brings elasticity, global reach, and convenience—at a premium.
Cycle exists to give teams real choice. By provisioning bare metal and cloud, and running containers and VMs side by side, Cycle lets you align your infrastructure strategy with your actual workloads, not industry trends.