Rackspace launched a new service, the “bare metal cloud” (more info here), because neighbours can be loud and you need some privacy and performance. Basically it’s Openstack on bare metal service and even Ubuntu joined the bandwagon with their MAAS (Metal as a Service).

Cloud Computing premise is to take full advantage of a massive distributed computing platform, automatically using and sharing resources, by lowering costs and operational effort. Metal as a Cloud is quite interesting, but saying that it solves your problems of performance and multi tenancy is like saying that you should stop using the tube and start using your own car, because you don’t like people around you and you get there faster – which is not necessarily true.

We deploy software on those cloud servers, we build services on top of software and we use the cloud to scale them or manage in an easy way. In the 90’s and 2000’s, when we had a problem with software (bad performance normally), we just bought more hardware and throw at the problem – more disk space, more memory, more cpu. 9 out of 10, bad performance was not because of the hardware, but because of our faulty or badly written software. We didn’t had time to optimize it properly, so we just get more and faster hardware.

Bare metal cloud is pretty much the same, masquerading our bad written software, with faster hardware. So, if you need more performance, maybe you should get a new look at your code and optimize it first, build it with cloud in mind and not blaming it on the cloud.