Bare metal can come back, says Gartner, citing VMware prices
In this technical retrospective (2024), @laktak shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 14 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
Doubtful. Containerization has eaten away at pure virtual marketshare — k8s is more popular now than VMWare. There’s not a chance in this world that the hyperscalers are going to go back to single-purpose machines. KVM is also perfectly capable, as is Hyper-V, for the small workloads described here. VMware is the best, but if the best is too expensive, second-best does the job just fine.
However, this piece also serves as an intro to the software of a modern datacenter. The author seems to have had a bunch of concepts thrown at them and had only a few sentences to explain each; actually looking at the techs involved will give you a better overview of what’s possible with only a physical machine or two!
The advantage to virtualization is having an API that can be used to spin up new k8s nodes. Bare metal provisioning is still a mess of PXE, badly-supported firmware, finicky DHCP and network settings and poor tooling. Server vendors could do a lot better here IMO.
I don't know anyone who actually uses VMware. The big cloud operators certainly don't. The small ones I know don't either (they use KVM). I guess that leaves an invisible middle?
It just makes no sense. If VMware is too expensive, people who need virtualization will switch to KVM (many big players already did). Using bare metal is a completely different use case.
I don't consider a vm "bare metal". Used vmware suite a ton when I started my career. Everything now is pxe tooling, in house provisioning apis, containers, etc.