Why Bare Metal Beats Cloud for Production Workloads

Cloud instances from AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have become the default choice for most production deployments, with bare metal often dismissed as "legacy" or unnecessarily complex. This shift made perfect sense in 2006 when AWS launched—cloud instances solved real problems: unreliable hardware, expensive procurement cycles, and configuration management nightmares.

But the assumptions that drove this shift no longer hold true. Modern server hardware is remarkably reliable, orchestration tools have matured dramatically, and the operational complexity that once favoured virtualised infrastructure has been replaced by new kinds of complexity at the cloud provider layer.

The landscape is now fundamentally different. We have mature open source orchestration and configuration systems—Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible—surrounded by huge open-source ecosystems of tooling and expertise. These systems provide the reliability, scalability, and automation that cloud instances originally promised, but they can run directly on bare metal and without vendor lock-in.

The irony is that we're now orchestrating our workloads on top of orchestrated VMs. We pay a price for this double-layered orchestration in cash, performance consistency, and mental overhead. Rather than adding more layers of abstraction, we should be removing them.

Here's why your next production deployment should target bare metal servers, not virtual machines.

The Real Cost of Cloud Instances¶

Cloud instance pricing models often prioritise provider revenue over customer value, creating several cost inefficiencies:

Premium Pricing: Hyperscaler margins can be substantial. Beyond infrastructure costs, you're often paying for extensive marketing, sales operations, and profit margins that may not directly benefit your workloads.

Surprise Charges: Data transfer fees, API calls, and storage IOPS charges can accumulate unexpectedly—costs that don't exist with dedicated hardware.

Engineering Overhead: Teams spend significant time debugging cloud-specific issues—IAM permissions, VPC networking problems, and service limits—rather than focusing on core product development.

Resource Bundling: Cloud instances typically bundle CPU, memory, and storage in fixed ratios that may not match your specific workload requirements, leading to over-provisioning of unused resources.

In our experience, a typical bare metal server often delivers 2-5x the performance per euro compared to equivalent cloud instances, whilst providing more consistent performance than shared infrastructure.

The Cloud Performance Tax¶

Cloud instances impose both performance penalties and operational complexity that compound into significant costs. The performance difference between bare metal and cloud instances isn't marginal—it's transformational, with typical improvements of 40-60% when migrating production workloads.

These aren't theoretical concerns—they're daily operational realities that manifest as both degraded application performance and increased engineering overhead.

Hardware Reliability: Addressing the Elephant in the Room¶

Modern server hardware is remarkably reliable, with redundant components and proven track records. More importantly, orchestration tools like Kubernetes are specifically designed to route around hardware failures, making individual server reliability less critical than it was at the dawn of AWS in 2006.

Reliability comes from the orchestration layer, not the infrastructure layer. Whether a node fails due to hardware issues or hypervisor problems, Kubernetes responds identically: it reschedules workloads to healthy nodes. The difference is that with bare metal, you eliminate an entire class of virtualisation-related failures whilst maintaining the same automated recovery capabilities.

Modern Orchestration: Beyond the Hyperscalers¶

The assumption that you need cloud instances for modern orchestration is outdated. The orchestration problem is solved. Whether you prefer Kubernetes for containers, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, or HashiCorp's stack for mixed workloads, these tools work identically on bare metal—often better, since they're not fighting virtualisation overhead.

Orchestration and virtualisation are separate concerns. You can have sophisticated deployment automation, service discovery, and scaling without the performance penalty of running everything inside virtual machines. Kubernetes provides the same service discovery, load balancing, and scaling capabilities whether it's running on AWS instances or dedicated hardware—but on bare metal, it does so without the virtualisation overhead and complexity.

For teams preferring infrastructure-as-code approaches, declarative configuration management works excellently with battle-tested service orchestration. Kubernetes delivers cloud-like APIs and self-service provisioning whilst running directly on the hardware, giving you operational benefits without vendor lock-in.

How We Solve These Problems¶

After reading about cloud complexity and performance taxes, you're probably thinking: "This sounds right, but I don't want to become a hardware company." That's exactly why we built Lithus.

We provide private cloud infrastructure that gives you all the benefits of bare metal without the operational overhead. You're not leaving the cloud—you're getting a better cloud experience built on dedicated hardware.

We eliminate every problem outlined above:

No More Surprise Bills: Fixed monthly pricing covers everything—compute, storage, network, and support. No data transfer fees, no API charges, no billing surprises.

Zero Engineering Overhead: Our team handles hardware procurement, data centre operations, and infrastructure management. Your engineers focus on your product, not debugging VPC configurations or IAM policies.

True Performance: Direct access to dedicated CPUs, memory, and NVMe storage. No hypervisor overhead, no noisy neighbours, no throttling. The 40-60% performance improvements are real and measurable.

Simplified Operations: You get a true private cloud with standard Kubernetes APIs instead of proprietary cloud services. SSH access to your infrastructure. No vendor lock-in or artificial limitations.

Expert DevOps Team Included: You get experienced Site Reliability Engineers who understand your systems and handle on-call responsibilities. No hiring required.

EU Data Sovereignty: Your infrastructure runs in German data centres with full compliance support, eliminating regulatory concerns.

Migration Without Disruption: We handle the entire transition process, ensuring zero downtime while your team continues shipping features.

The result? You get enterprise-grade private cloud infrastructure at a fraction of public cloud costs, with a dedicated team managing operations so your engineers can focus on what matters: building your product.

Next Steps¶

If you're currently running production workloads on cloud instances, consider whether you're paying the virtualisation tax unnecessarily:

• Audit your current cloud costs including all the hidden charges for data transfer, premium storage, and support
• Benchmark your application performance to establish baseline metrics for comparison
• Calculate the total cost of ownership including engineering time spent on instance-specific issues
• Evaluate bare metal alternatives that provide equivalent or better capabilities

For workloads with predictable resource requirements and performance sensitivity, bare metal often delivers better outcomes at lower total cost.

Key Takeaways¶

• Cloud instances add complexity and overhead without corresponding benefits for most production workloads
• Modern orchestration tools work excellently on bare metal infrastructure
• Performance improvements of 40-60% are common when migrating from cloud instances to bare metal
• Total cost of ownership often favours bare metal when you include all cloud charges and operational overhead
• Reliability improves when you eliminate hypervisor layers and shared resource contention