Big Cloud Still Runs Most Containers on VMs; What Does that Mean for the Rest of Us?

If bare metal provides the best raw performance, why do hyperscalers still insist on running their own infrastructure on virtual machines? The answer reveals what the companies running the world’s most complex infrastructure really think about cloud architecture. Research by the analyst firm ReveCom shows how the major cloud providers overwhelmingly deploy their containerized workloads on virtual machines rather than on bare metal servers. In addition to relying primarily on VMs to support their in-house operations (with the exception of Google), they also rely on VMs instead of bare metal to support the services they offer customers. Those findings are based on reviews of documentation and interviews with engineers and executives at AWS, Google, Microsoft, and DigitalOcean.