Bare-Metal PaaS
The Rise of Bare-Metal Clouds
Cloud and Virtualization are not mandatory, and the number of cloud providers that supports bare-metal clouds is growing, as David Linthicum pointed out in his article Going native: The move to bare-metal cloud services
It’s a fact that virtualization is not a requirement when creating cloud computing services, but it is helpful to those who manage the service. Indeed, Google is able to provide a multitenant cloud computing platform without virtualization; there are other examples as well.
Internap, SoftLayer, Rackspace, Liquid Web, and New Servers (also known as BareMetalCloud.com) also provide access to the bare metal. You can count on more providers to join the fray as cloud computing users continue to demand that their managed hosting environments work like their native environments.
Performance Matters
The main reason for the rise of bare-metal clouds is that virtualization often comes with a cost. There is a large class of applications where the virtulization overhead is unacceptable, as Carl Brooks, a cloud analyst at Tier 1, a division of 451 Research, points out here:
By having dedicated servers that are not virtualized, and therefore do not have a hypervisor layer, users can experience an uptick in speed, Brooks says, in some cases as much as 10% depending on the application. This can be an attractive option for high-performance compute needs, advanced Web 2.0 developers, or applications that require a large amount of database resources. Basically any situation “where the performance matters the most”
Come to think of it, the main thing that brought us to virtualization in the first place was the ability to create new servers on demand, as opposed to it taking days or weeks with dedicated servers. Now, with the avliability of bare-metal clouds, it is possible to get the same level of flexibility without the virtualization overhead, and with more control and flexibiltiy on the specific HW configuration and setup. This makes the choice of bare-metal clouds much more attractive than in the past.
Bare-Metal PaaS
A Bare-Metal PaaS Example with Cloudify
With that, it only made sense to look at bare-metal clouds as any other virtualized cloud. So we ended up writing a bare-metal cloud driver, which is referred to as the Bring Your Own Node (BYON) cloud driver.
A BYON cloud is set simply by specifying a list or range of IP addresses as our cloud pool. Cloudify then uses this pool to provision the application and its services. Below is a simple example that shows what this configuration looks like.
templates ([SMALL_LINUX : template{custom ([“nodesList” : ([([“id” : “vm1”,“ip” : “10.10.10.1”]),([“id” : “vm2”,“ip” : “10.10.10.2”]),([“id” : “vm3”,“ip” : “10.10.10.3”])])])}])