Common Use Cases for Bare Metal Servers

Let's be honest, everything runs better on bare metal. When you're not sharing resources or dealing with hypervisors, performance is consistent, latency is low, and you have total control over the stack.

Historically though, that performance came at a cost — bare metal meant manual provisioning, longer deployment times, and a lot more hands-on work to scale or automate. Because of that, most teams only ran high-demand, critical workloads on bare metal and left the rest to VMs or the cloud.

Now that's changing.

With platforms like Cycle.io automating bare metal provisioning, networking, and orchestration, you get cloud-like agility on physical infrastructure — and suddenly, it's viable to run a lot more workloads on bare metal without the old operational overhead.

Still, let's take a look at the workloads that have always made sense for bare metal — the ones where performance, control, and consistency weren't optional.

High-Performance Databases

Databases are where bare metal shines — and not just for the big enterprise systems.

Whether it's PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle, databases thrive when they have dedicated resources, fast storage, and predictable latency. On shared infrastructure, performance can spike or stall depending on what else is running. On bare metal, you know exactly what you're getting — and it's consistent.

For write-heavy or IOPS-intensive workloads, shared cloud instances often require overprovisioning just to stabilize performance. Bare metal eliminates that guesswork.

AI/ML Workloads That Hit the Hardware

Training models? Running large datasets through neural nets? You need maximum GPU or TPU performance — and that means no virtualization overhead.

While it's possible to virtualize GPU access, nothing beats direct hardware access. Bare metal ensures your ML workloads hit the full potential of the hardware — which can cut training time, reduce costs, and simplify tuning.

For teams building inference pipelines or training at scale, bare metal also provides the networking and storage performance needed to keep things moving without bottlenecks.

Streaming, Gaming, and Real-Time Applications

These workloads are latency-sensitive — small delays can mean buffering, dropped frames, or lag, which is a non-starter for end users.

Bare metal helps ensure low jitter, consistent response times, and the ability to handle spikes in load without collapsing performance. Whether you're hosting game servers, running video encoding, or supporting real-time communication platforms, bare metal delivers predictable network and compute performance under pressure.

Compliance and Security-Heavy Environments

Some industries can't run on shared infrastructure due to compliance — think healthcare (HIPAA), finance (PCI), or enterprise (SOC 2). Bare metal allows teams to fully isolate workloads, control data locality, and lock down the entire environment from hardware up.

There's no risk of noisy neighbors or side-channel attacks across shared hypervisors. Bare metal also simplifies auditing and access controls, especially when combined with on-prem or colocation deployments.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Many teams run virtual machines or containers on top of bare metal — consolidating multiple workloads on powerful servers while maintaining performance and flexibility.

This is often called hyperconverged infrastructure, and it's ideal when you want the efficiency of virtualization or containers, but need the raw performance of bare metal underneath.

It's a good fit for teams that are virtualizing workloads internally, running private cloud environments, or managing hybrid infrastructure.

If your workload needs raw power, predictable performance, or tight compliance, it's probably time to think about bare metal again — but this time, with modern tools that make it just as easy to manage as the cloud.