A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the announcement that AWS is now offering dedicated physical servers to customers. Apparently RackSpace has had something called OnMetal which is a similar offering. They announced OnMetal v2 today. I wasn’t sure this was something really headed in the right direction, as I spoke about in the previous AWS blog. I’m still not sure, to be honest. But apparently there is some strong customer demand for it.
While I’m sure that’s the case, I’m still not sure it’s heading in the right direction. Jason Barnhill writes, in the blog referenced above:
“As many businesses have already discovered, OnMetal Cloud Servers solve the problems inherent in today’s multi-tenant virtual machines: inconsistent performance, noisy neighbors and the hypervisor tax. With OnMetal, you get bare-metal speeds and consistent performance in a single-tenant environment.”
Do the applications experiencing problems like inconsistent performance really belong in the cloud, though? Perhaps this is why we need hybrid cloud solutions. I imagine there’s a tax for haivng a dedicated physical server hosted by a cloud provider.