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Cloud Computing · Intermediate

Bare Metal Instance

Cloud server that gives the customer direct access to physical hardware without a provider hypervisor layer.

Definition

Bare metal instances provide a dedicated physical server with processor and memory exposed directly, suiting workloads that need hardware features, specific licensing, their own hypervisor or maximum performance. Examples include EC2 metal instance types, OCI bare metal shapes and Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution.

Example

Running VMware or a custom hypervisor on an EC2 m7i.metal instance.

Exam tip

Choose bare metal when a scenario needs non-virtualized access or nested virtualization; choose dedicated hosts when the need is per-socket licensing visibility.

Related terms