Bare metal cloud is a popular cloud deployment strategy, with many benefits for high performance and/or low latency applications. This is a flexible public cloud service that comes without any pre-installed virtualization infrastructure or operating systems.
But not all bare metal cloud providers offer the same global network reach — and this is a problem for businesses that want to enter high-growth emerging markets throughout places like APAC, LATAM, and EMEA. In this post, we’ll explain how bare metal cloud works and why it’s important to work with a bare metal provider with extensive global coverage to enhance your distributed edge computing capability.
Why use bare metal cloud? Top advantages of bare metal
Bare metal cloud comes with several advantages. For example, it’s highly scalable, and gives you full control over system and network security. At the same time, bare metal cloud offers a way to access high-end cloud computing hardware on-demand at affordable pricing, making it a great option for edge computing and distributed blockchain projects. It also allows for greater flexibility over bandwidth and memory usage, enabling core affinity and reducing CPU contention for high performance applications. With containers getting broadly deployed, using bare metal cloud can reduce the stack and complexity by running containers directly on bare metal instead of VMs.
How does bare-metal cloud work with a distributed computing system?
Bare metal cloud is a high-performance infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. With bare metal cloud, you rent exclusive distributed bare metal servers from a service provider and use them as a dedicated resource. In other words, your company won’t have to share computing, network, or storage resources with other customers. This model ensures the flexibility and reliability of the cloud from just about any location, but with an advanced level of control and customization. Thus, bare metal cloud is an ideal cloud service for edge computing.
Bare metal cloud offers many advantages including:
-Full control over the hardware’s physical components
-No resource sharing – eliminates “noisy neighbor” effect
-Instant scalability
-Direct connections to public clouds
-Suitable for highest perform applications
-Customizable full cloud stack, or BYOL
-No agents or hypervisor, and simplified for container deployment
-Scalable and secure
Why server location matters in a distributed computing network
End-users today want access to fast and efficient digital services, from web services, to games, VR/ AR, and interactive conferencing and collaborative video streaming. Slow websites, applications, and cloud services result in poor user experiences, and unhappy customers. In fact, research indicates that 49% of customers have left a brand within the last year due to poor customer experience. (1)
Edge computing is a global distributed platform composing of bare metal cloud. To provide strong customer experiences for real-time, interactive digital services — such as live streaming, esports, PoS blockchains — need to be optimized with minimal latency between users and PoPs globally. The physical location of your bare metal cloud servers will have a direct impact on data transfer speeds and service quality. Deploying bare metal cloud servers close to end users in global markets shortens the overall distance that data must travel, resulting in a superior digital experience.
To illustrate, imagine a company in New York City trying to expand into Southeast Asia. This company would want to deploy bare metal cloud servers close to end-users in places like Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, and Jakarta. It makes far more sense to deploy locally than to deploy them thousands of miles from the company’s data sources. This strategy can reduce network latency to below 20 milliseconds, enabling real-time communications with minimize performance issues like jitter, and packet loss.
How to select bare metal server provider for a distributed computing network
Emerging market coverage
It helps to work with a provider that extends beyond Tier 1 cities, into developing markets with growing digital populations like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Your bare metal cloud provider should be able to instantly deploy bare metal cloud services wherever your target end-users are located.
Direct connectivity
As we explain in a recent post, a direct cloud connection is a dedicated connection in a private network or between a private network and the cloud. A cloud network direct connection makes it possible to instantly connect computing infrastructure, for faster and more reliable data transmissions.
Availability
The bare metal cloud provider that you partner with should allow you to go to market without delay. Make sure to work with a provider that already has available, optimized network infrastructure in place so that you can go to market without delay.
Scalability
The provider should also make it effortless and instant to scale your bare metal cloud services as your business needs change. So when looking for a vendor, ask about their server availability. The provider should be able enable you to shift resources between regions with click-button ease.
Blockchain-ready infrastructure
A growing number of blockchain PoS validators are using bare metal cloud services to support their projects. If you operating or participating in a PoS chain project, it’s a good idea to use a bare metal cloud provider offering blockchain-ready infrastructure, meaning optimized servers at the edge of the network and cloud networking services. This combination powers PoS chains with ultra-low latency and direct connectivity.
Zenlayer Bare Metal Cloud: Combining high-performance bare metal with cloud flexibility
Here at Zenlayer, we offer on-demand servers across more than 40 countries including fast-growing, hard-to-reach economies with explosive potential. Our Bare Metal Cloud (BMC) service combines the high-performance computing power of bare metal with cloud flexibility for unmatched user experience with lightning-fast speeds. In addition, customers can connect directly to servers and clouds across multiple regions, for secure access with ultra-low latency.
We also offer 24/7 technical support with rapid response troubleshooting and speedy resolution times, providing peace of mind. To learn more about BMC, visit our product page.
Resources
(1) https://go.emplifi.io/us-uk-customer-expectations-report.html
