A bare metal server is a physical server in a cloud environment that is dedicated to a single customer, with the operating system running directly on the hardware rather than on top of a virtualization layer like a hypervisor. This differs from standard cloud instances, which share physical hardware across multiple tenants via a hypervisor.
Bare metal servers are provisioned and managed using industry-standard protocols like IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) for remote access and control, or the newer DMTF Redfish standard, a RESTful API for server lifecycle management. Operating system deployment typically occurs via PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment), which boots the OS over the network. Between tenant assignments, the provider wipes storage and resets firmware to ensure isolation.
Some cloud providers use thin offload cards—for example, AWS Nitro—that handle virtualization of networking and storage I/O while keeping the CPU unvirtualized, presenting a bare metal experience to the operating system.
Example use cases:
- Running high-performance databases or data analytics with full hardware access
- Applications requiring specialized CPUs (GPUs, FPGAs) without virtualization overhead
- AWS EC2
.metalinstance types likei3.metalorc5.metal - IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) bare metal compute shapes
WarningBare metal provisioning takes several minutes (hardware reset, firmware reflash, PXE reimaging) compared to seconds for VMs. Bare metal instances cannot be live-migrated or oversubscribed, so scaling requires pre-reserved capacity rather than elastic scaling.
Check /features/cloud-servers for infrastructure provisioning options.