
Time to Break Out of Your VMs. For Containers, Home Is Where the Bare Metal Is - chakri-nelluri
https://thenewstack.io/for-containers-home-is-where-the-bare-metal-is/
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guitarbill
Ugh, it's a shame it's such a hype piece (especially the first 5 paragraphs),
with no mention of security. While VM escapes are possible, generally it's
harder than a container escape. Since plenty of people already run containers
on bare metal, I'm really not sure what the post is trying to say or trying to
sell, other than taking a dig at VMWare:

> That being said, VMs aren’t currently in danger of being replaced outright
> by containers; in fact, there are distinct use cases for VMs that containers
> aren’t well-suited for. However, for VMWare’s business, there is clearly a
> lot at stake.

After all this, I still don't really understand the value-add of Diamanti. So
it's Kubernetes + a GUI? Why would I choose it over doing my own on-prem on
one extreme, or using a cloud solution (AWS/GCP/Azure) on the other? (Except
maybe to avoid doing Kubernetes upgrades myself :D )

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xyzzy123
I disagree with the management simplicity argument. I’ve tried both and
personally prefer VMs over metal for non-cloud container deployments.

VMs (e.g. via vsphere on top of the metal) allow you to:

* Have more kernels (lowers container to container interference)

* Allocate iops to things

* Choose whether you want to use the vm layer (vmotion/drs) to achieve uptime in the face of hardware failure or downtime - if you are metal only you _have_ to cluster everything.

* Trial new stuff (different base OS or scheduler) much more easily

* Get networking the way you want it without configuring switches or moving cables all the time.

BTW the terraform vsphere provider + govc makes managing vsphere with no
pointy clicky pretty easy these days.

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deweller
Cloud providers have standardized on VMs. If I were to deploy an app in the
cloud using bare metal servers, I would lose all of the infrastructure,
convenience and tooling provided to be by my cloud provider (AWS, Google
Cloud, Azure, etc).

This is the strongest argument for me to continue to use containers on top of
VMs.

If someone can provide me a secure, convenient, low-cost way to run my own
containers on bare metal, I would be very interested. Does such a thing exist?

~~~
testvox
AWS bare metal servers are pretty nice and you can use them with AWS's
container management systems.

> Bare Metal instances are full-fledged members of the EC2 family and can take
> advantage of Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, Auto
> Recovery, and so forth. They can also access the full suite of AWS database,
> IoT, mobile, analytics, artificial intelligence, and security services.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-bare-
metal-i...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-
instances-with-direct-access-to-hardware/)

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gz5
Isn't the main variable impeding the % of bare metal container deployments
scaling with automation in areas such as inter-container networking and
visibility.

Many years of "wrappers" around VMs in those areas - people, processes and
software. A few years for similar to develop for a containerized world?

Until then, we run containers on top of VMs for use cases at scale because
(even if not efficient from other perspectives) we do get the wrappers
(wrappers which do impact time, TCO, risk, etc)?

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mtgx
Have fun with the data breaches. Maybe if we were talking about unikernels...

