Bare metal · 3 min read
How we decide whether bare metal suits you
Short version
- Bare metal pays off for steady load. Uneven load needs a hybrid setup or a different plan.
- A bill over about $2,000 a month, with large egress and NAT lines, strengthens the case.
- Proprietary managed services, an existing platform team and certification requirements are the usual reasons to stay put.
1. Is your traffic roughly the same week to week?
A flat load is the whole case for bare metal. Hyperscalers charge for elasticity, and you pay for it whether you use it or not. If your load swings hard, that elasticity is doing real work for you. If only part of it swings, a hybrid setup keeps the steady core on bare metal and sends the spikes to a small elastic layer.
2. Is your infrastructure bill over about $2,000 a month, and what is in it?
Below that, the saving rarely covers the cost of moving and running the cluster. The number is a rule of thumb, and the audit checks it against your real invoices.
Look at the bandwidth lines too. Egress and NAT gateway charges appear as separate items on a hyperscaler invoice, and a large share there makes the case for moving stronger. How large varies a lot between workloads, so we measure the real share in the audit instead of guessing from an average.
3. How much do you rely on proprietary managed services?
DynamoDB, Lambda and Kinesis have no open-source twin you can run in a cluster, so leaving them means rewriting the parts of your application that call them. Lighter use is easier. A managed Postgres or a load balancer can be replaced with open-source parts such as CloudNativePG, and the config lives in your repo.
4. Do you already have a platform team?
If you do, you may want to run this yourselves, and we would be an extra cost. If you do not, ask who gets paged when etcd fails at 3am. In most small companies that is a founder or the one senior engineer. The retainer exists to take that off them.
5. Does compliance require a specific hyperscaler certification?
If a customer contract or an auditor names a certification that only one provider holds, moving off that provider creates a problem we cannot fix for you. We would rather you hear that now than after a migration.
What the answers mean
Four or five answers in our favour make a strong fit, and the audit will put a number on it. Two or three make a call worthwhile, because a partial move may make sense. Fewer than that, you should probably stay put, and we will say so.
The audit is where we check all of this against your invoices. It takes ten working days, the report is yours whatever it says, and if it says do not migrate, we mean it.
The same five questions run as a 30-second fit check on our Bare-Metal Kubernetes page. If you want to talk it through, book a 30-minute call.