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I am trying to understand the difference between bare-metal servers and cloud servers. I am referring to the following document,blog.

I understand that Amazon EC2(which is all the rage) is an example of cloud servers, is there any benefit of bare-metal servers over cloud servers like Amazon EC2? In what scenario will we use bare-metal servers over cloud-servers like Amazon EC2?

Also, I see the term on-prem servers a lot? Are they just bare-metal servers placed in an office as opposed to a remote location?

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  • What is the business problem you’re trying to solve right now? Cost? Availability? Performance? Security? Regulatory compliance? Each of the three alternatives intersects with these concerns a little differently. Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 8:35
  • @J_H Can there be hypervisor based virtualization in on-premise servers? or are they always bare-metal? Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 8:53
  • What business problem are you trying to solve? Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 11:44
  • @PhilipKendall I am trying to understand the difference between various server terms, Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 12:26
  • That would seem to be off-topic here unless you have an actual software problem that means you need to choose between those things. Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 12:32

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You don't quite have the right terms.

  1. Bare metal server : an actual computer you can touch running a single OS.
  2. Virtual server : Software running on a bare metal server which pretends to be a server. eg VirtualBox this allows multiple "virtual servers" to run on the same hardware.
  3. Cloud server : A virtual server provided by a company over the internet. "in the cloud" ie EC2 instances
  4. On prem server : a server which runs on premises that you own. It might be bare metal or virtual

Normally the term "bare metal" is used to indicate that a program is not running on a virtual server, which might introduce a performance hit. ie "the database is running on bare metal"

You really need to to two comparisons,

  • bare metal vs virtual
  • cloud vs on prem
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  • so virtual box based virtual servers are different from hypervisor based virtual servers? Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 12:27
  • VirtualBox is a hypervisor. Commented Feb 21, 2024 at 12:29

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