By now, everyone has heard the gospel of the cloud. AWS, Azure, GCP are the default answer to every infrastructure question. Kubernetes is the new standard. Serverless is the next frontier. Infrastructure as Code is law. Every CTO deck includes a slide with the word “cloud-native” in 64pt font.
And yet, behind the scenes, in the ops war rooms of the world, there’s a much quieter group of engineers doing something that sounds outdated.
They’re still using bare metal.
Real hardware. No hypervisor layers. No managed autoscaling groups. No multi-tenant VMs. Just raw compute. And they’re doing it on purpose.
Here’s why it’s not just valid, it’s smart.
1. Because Real Performance Still Matters
Let’s get something out of the way: virtualization has overhead. And if you’re using a public cloud, that overhead is baked in, whether you’re on EC2, Google Compute, or some “burstable” shared instance.
When you run your workload on bare metal, you get the full CPU, not just slices of a core with noisy neighbors. You get consistent memory throughput, direct disk IO, and no mystery performance cliffs due to hidden “credit” systems or throttling under load.
For latency-sensitive apps (game servers, financial trading, real-time APIs, …), bare metal is still the gold standard. And DevOps engineers who care about performance know it.
2. Because You’re Tired of Paying for Air
Cloud pricing is designed for convenience… and profit. Actually, mostly profit. You’re not paying for resources. You’re paying for many layers of abstraction. You’re paying for scalability you don’t use, egress bandwidth you didn’t know was expensive, and managed services you could have self-hosted in 20 minutes.
Bare metal infrastructure, whether colocation or rented dedicated servers, offers flat, predictable pricing. You know exactly what you’re paying for, and it doesn’t change if your app goes viral or one engineer forgets to shut off a test instance.
For engineers who actually monitor budgets and actually understand workloads, that predictability matters.
3. Because Real Engineers Understand Their Stack
There’s a trend in modern DevOps that feels more like DevAbstraction. Everything is a managed service, glued together with YAML. You don’t patch kernels. You don’t configure disks. You don’t even install the database anymore, you just “provision” it with Terraform and hope it doesn’t cost $700/month.
Bare metal forces you to understand what you’re running, and how it runs.
You learn:
- How Linux scheduling affects perforamance
- How NVMe disk queues impact PostgreSQL
- How DDoS mitigation works at the network edge
- What “10Gbps full-duplex” actually means
- What the heck a “VLAN” is
If that sounds like a burden instead of a badge of honor, you might not be a DevOps engineer. You might just be… a cloud user.
4. Because Real DevOps Is About Control
Cloud infrastructure gives you options. Bare metal gives you control.
Want to build your own private network overlay? Go ahead. Want to tune your I/O schedulers, implement custom BGP sessions, or bind services to specific NUMA zones? Be our guest.
Try doing that in AWS without hitting permission walls, support tickets, or undocumented service behavior.
When things break, and they will break, it’s comforting to know that you have root, full access to the metal, no abstraction layers playing gatekeeper, and you actually know what’s going on.
5. Because Kubernetes Isn’t Always the Answer
Somewhere along the way, “DevOps” became synonymous with “running Kubernetes in the cloud.” And sure, Kubernetes is amazing, for companies that need it.
But for 80% of startups and internal apps? It’s total overkill.
A few good Ansible playbooks, some containers, and a dedicated server can get you 90% of the way there, with just 10% of the complexity.
Real engineers don’t reach for Kubernetes or any other flashy tool just because it’s trendy. They use it when it’s the best tool for the job. And sometimes? That job just needs a solid server with a good backup strategy.
6. Because Abstraction is a Liability
When you have no idea what’s under the hood, you can’t debug it. You can’t tune it. You can’t secure it. And you sure as hell can’t fix it.
Cloud-native architecture can work wonders… Until you hit a vendor bug, undocumented feature, or incident that sits squarely inside a black box. And then you’re stuck waiting, escalating, and hoping someone at AWS support knows what a TCP retransmit is.
With bare metal, you own the stack. You know the kernel version. You know the NIC driver. You know your limits. And that means you can optimize, defend, and debug better than someone relying on a support email.
So, Who’s Still Using Bare Metal?
It’s not just stubborn old-school sysadmins.
- Latency-sensitive startups running APIs or gaming services
- Fintech platforms that need guaranteed compute and compliance
- Cloud-savvy engineers who want to run k3s, Nomad, or Docker their way
- Cost-conscious founders optimizing burn and avoiding lock-in
And yeah, real DevOps engineers. The kind who care more about solving problems than riding hype waves.
The Bottom Line
Bare metal isn’t just alive, it’s thriving. And while the rest of the world chases the next big cloud feature, the smartest engineers are quietly building fast, reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure on top of servers they actually control.
Not every project needs bare metal. But if you’ve never even considered it, maybe it’s time to rethink what “real DevOps” actually means.
Interested in moving your company’s infrastructure away from the cloud? Contact us using the chat function at the bottom of this page and we’ll send you a free outline for how you can move your company’s infrastructure onto bare metal, without losing any reliability or control.