EC2 Bare Metal Instances with Direct Access to Hardware
In this technical retrospective (2017), @jeffbarr 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 Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 385 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 127 comments
Packet.net, arguably the leader in api driven, on demand bare metal instances, recently blogged about this: https://www.packet.net/blog/why-we-cant-wait-for-aws-to-announce-its-bare-metal-product/
I am a customer of packet's, along with other virtual and dedicated hosting providers. I don't use aws ec2. I've been pleased with Packet, and their offerings are much more diverse than this initial offering from aws.
OT: Job advice needed (because I think many back-end devs will be here :D)
I'm thinking about going full-stack next year. I have a bit of experience building APIs besides being mainly a front-end developer.
Is going "cloud only" a good idea? I thought about starting with AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB and the Serverless framework.
Are the providers hugely different or is it a good idea to spread out and do some Azure and GCP too?
What differentiates these from dedicated boxes in server rack? Is their dedicated "cloud" hardware somehow managing access to RAM/storage/etc?
On another tangent - how do Google Cloud and EC2 attach GPUs to instances - given that you can choose CPU and RAM the GPUs must somehow be modularized away from a dedicated server?
I'm really, really, happy about this. I've been complaining about the lack of cloud servers with exposed performance counters to any cloud vendor that'll listen (though of course nothing ever came of that). Kudos AWS, this is really cool.
That's probably the most interesting aspect for me.
Does anyone know how that's provisioned? i.e 8x just under 2TB volumes, or something else?