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Bare Metal

Bare metal deployment means installing an operating system and services directly onto physical hardware, offering simplicity and high performance at the cost of scalability and deployment flexibility.

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About this video

Bare metal deployment is the practice of installing an operating system and running services directly on physical hardware, without any virtualization or abstraction layer between the software and the machine. It is the model most familiar to everyday users, representing the standard configuration of a personal laptop or desktop, and it remains widely used in small business environments where IT infrastructure is straightforward and performance demands are high. The primary advantages of bare metal are its simplicity and raw performance. There is no overhead introduced by a hypervisor or container runtime, which means applications have direct access to all available hardware resources. This makes bare metal a strong choice for workloads where latency and throughput are critical concerns, such as high-performance databases or computationally intensive applications. However, bare metal comes with meaningful tradeoffs. Resource contention can occur when multiple applications compete for the same hardware, and scaling the environment requires physically procuring, speccing, and deploying new machines — a process that can be slow and costly. These deployment overhead challenges make bare metal impractical as a universal solution in larger or more dynamic environments. As a result, it is typically used selectively for performance-sensitive components, while virtualization handles the broader infrastructure.

What you'll learn

Describe the bare metal deployment model, including its key characteristics, common use cases, and the trade-offs between performance and scalability.

What's covered

Bare Metal Deployment

What Is Bare Metal
- OS installed on hardware
- Services run on top
- Common user setup
Pros
- Simple to set up
- High performance
- Control over resources
Cons
- Resource contention
- Scalability issues
- Lengthy deployment process
  - Spec and quote hardware
  - Purchase physical server
  - Installation setup steps
Common Use Cases
- User desktops and laptops
- Small businesses
- Performance-critical databases

Key terms

Server: A computer or program that provides services or resources to other devices, known as clients, over a network.
Scalability: The ability of a system to handle increased load by adding resources without degrading performance.
Virtual Machine: A software emulation of a physical computer that runs an operating system and applications.
Bare Metal: A deployment model in which an operating system or application runs directly on physical hardware without any virtualization layer, providing maximum performance by eliminating hypervisor overhead.

Topics

Bare Metal Deployment Models Physical Infrastructure Server Administration Operating Systems Cloud Computing

Transcript

The first deployment model that we'll explore is bare metal. This is installing the operating systems and the services directly on the machine itself. We call it bare metal because it's on the machine.

Bare metal is really just probably what you're viewing this on right now. You have a laptop or a desktop and it has an operating system installed on it. So we have the machine itself, the hardware; we've got an operating system that's installed on it; and then we have a bunch of services that are running on top of that. This is a very common setup for users or for small businesses.

Pros and cons

There are some pros and cons to this. One of the pros is that it's very simple to set up. It's not complicated. All we do is roll out the machine and install the operating system, or the operating system is already installed on it, and then roll services out on top of that. We can get some really high performance with this.

Some of the drawbacks are that some applications could have contention with it. There could be resource contentions, and there could be scalability issues. Common places I see this are definitely on users' desktops and laptops, and in a lot of small businesses where they don't have a lot of resources or where performance is a real concern. What they'll do is roll out bare metal so that they have more control over the performance.

One of the issues with bare metal is that every time we deploy a new service, we have to spec out those requirements. We have to get quotes and get vendors. We have to go through the purchase to buy this physical server, if this is a server, and then we go through the installation setups. This can be a lengthy process. So I'd say these deployment tasks are one of the big drawbacks to using bare metal, at least using bare metal all the time. So a lot of times we'll use bare metal maybe on something like a database where performance is really key and a big concern, and then we'll virtualize other parts of our environment, our software, our services.

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