Bare metal cloud is a natural and parallel evolution in cloud. As companies transition from virtualized environments and physical servers to ?as a service’ models in SaaS and PaaS, they are faced with an array of cloud based deployment options. While traditional models of cloud provide businesses with increased flexibility and cost-effective IT infrastructure, the presence of the virtual layer plagues performance levels for selected high workloads and intensive applications. Bare metal cloud addresses this by removing the hypervisor, thereby creating a non-virtualized environment towards creating the necessary performance impact. This is a logical step in the evolution of cloud.

The ability to enhance server efficiency and offer the same flexibility as VM cloud environments makes bare metal clouds a key contender in performance driven enterprise solutions. Some of the other benefits of the solution include the built in automation, large scaling, pay as you go models and hourly billing. This brings cloud economics at scale with measurable cost benefits at deployment.

Enterprise IT is a dynamic industry. A decade back, cloud was nascent. Today, private cloud alone is an $80 billion industry. Evolution in enterprise IT and applications directly transcends to better forms of IT solutions, systems and services. In that aspect, bare metal is not revolutionary, but a necessary branch of the evolution from physical to virtual and distributed architectures. So, to handle future complex IT problems, it is too soon to tell if bare metal environments be the ideal solution. However, in a restricted IT budgetary scenario, to achieve performance and scale, bare metal clouds fit very well within enterprises that are looking for performance and predictable scale.

Along with bare metal clouds, containers are garnering increasing market and demand interests. Docker has a significant impact on bare metal cloud. Gradually, it has entrenched its way into the enterprise IT ecosystem. With the potential to replace the hypervisor and VMs, bare metal cloud service providers are ready to adopt it. Container management and orchestration matched with bare metal performance makes a solid case for an enterprise class solution in production environments. The negation of complex overheads from traditional virtualization makes the rise of containers as a key opportunity for bare metal clouds.