The Rise of Platform Engineering
For more than a decade, DevOps has driven software delivery by encouraging collaboration between developers and operations. It introduced automation, version control, CI/CD pipelines, and observability into the mainstream. But as organizations scale, DevOps alone isn’t enough. In 2025, a new architectural and operational shift is gaining traction — platform engineering.
Platform engineering isn’t just an iteration of DevOps; it's a fundamental rethink. It’s about creating internal developer platforms (IDPs) that abstract complex infrastructure into simple, reusable layers. These platforms enable development teams to deploy, test, and scale applications without worrying about what’s happening under the hood. And while cloud-native platforms are the default for many, bare metal infrastructure is playing a surprising — and critical — role in this transformation.
Bare metal, once associated with traditional data centers and static deployments, is now re-emerging as a key enabler of flexibility, performance, and predictability. With the rise of Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS), platform engineers can now provision dedicated, high-performance infrastructure as easily as they do virtual machines in the cloud.
Let’s explore how and why bare metal fits into the future of platform engineering.
What Is Platform Engineering?
A Shift Toward Developer Experience
Platform engineering is the practice of designing and building internal platforms to improve the productivity and efficiency of software developers. These internal platforms, often referred to as IDPs, provide a curated set of tools, services, and APIs to streamline the software delivery lifecycle.
Rather than each team managing its own infrastructure, security, or CI/CD pipelines, platform engineering introduces a shared, scalable platform that standardizes and automates those concerns.
Core Characteristics
- Developer-Centric: The platform is treated as a product, with developers as its customers.
- Automated: It supports automated provisioning, deployment, and observability.
- Multicloud and Hybrid-Ready: Built to run across environments — public cloud, on-premises, or edge.
- Secure by Design: Policies for identity, access, encryption, and auditing are embedded from the start.
- Self-Service: Developers can spin up environments and services without waiting on ops teams.
Platform engineering aims to reduce friction and cognitive overhead, freeing developers to focus on coding while providing operations teams with greater consistency and control.
Why Platform Teams Are Turning to Bare Metal
Bare metal infrastructure may seem counterintuitive in an age of containerization and serverless computing. But for platform engineers building IDPs, bare metal offers tangible benefits that virtualization and multitenant cloud platforms often can’t match.
1. Unmatched Performance and Predictability
Cloud computing excels at elasticity and convenience, but it comes with performance trade-offs. Shared resources and hypervisors introduce variability, often referred to as "noisy neighbor" effects. These issues are especially noticeable in high-throughput and latency-sensitive applications.
Bare metal, by contrast, provides direct access to hardware. There’s no hypervisor to slow things down, no competition for I/O bandwidth, and no unpredictable throttling.
This makes bare metal ideal for:
- AI/ML model training and inference
- High-frequency trading applications
- Real-time analytics pipelines
- Computer vision and GPU-intensive tasks
- Media transcoding and streaming workloads
Platform engineers value this predictability, especially when building standardized environments for diverse teams with demanding workloads.
2. Full Resource Control and Customization
Cloud-based VMs and containers abstract away infrastructure, which is great for simplicity, but limiting for teams needing fine-grained control.
With bare metal, platform teams can:
- Tune CPU and memory configurations for optimal NUMA alignment
- Maximize NVMe performance for low-latency storage
- Use specialized networking interfaces like SR-IOV or RDMA
- Select exact hardware specs — including GPU types and core counts
These capabilities are crucial in industries like telco, finance, and healthcare where milliseconds can affect revenue or compliance.
3. Transparent and Predictable Costs
Public cloud pricing is notoriously complex. Ingress and egress fees, API calls, managed service charges, and tiered usage can make forecasting costs a nightmare.
Bare metal simplifies this:
- Flat monthly or hourly pricing
- No hidden bandwidth or API fees
- Clear capacity limits and performance expectations
Platform teams managing budgets across dozens or hundreds of microservices can plan more accurately and avoid surprise invoices.
Key Use Cases Where Bare Metal Excels
Bare metal’s resurgence is fueled by a growing list of platform engineering use cases. Here are four scenarios where bare metal proves invaluable:
1. Internal AI and ML Platforms
Developing and serving AI workloads demands massive processing power. Tools like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face perform best on dedicated GPU clusters.
Platform engineers are building internal AI platforms using:
- GPU-enabled bare metal for training models
- Low-latency inference pipelines hosted on edge servers
- Hybrid AI architectures combining on-prem and cloud resources
Bare metal’s direct access to hardware ensures that these workloads run fast, predictably, and without virtualization penalties.
2. Financial Platforms and Fintech
Fintech companies depend on ultra-low latency, deterministic performance, and strict data privacy controls.
Platform teams at these firms leverage bare metal to:
- Build execution environments for algorithmic trading
- Isolate sensitive workloads for regulatory compliance
- Eliminate jitter and variance that cloud VMs introduce
Whether it's processing payments or running fraud detection algorithms, bare metal enables the consistency required for mission-critical systems.
3. Gaming and Media Platforms
Gaming platforms and real-time streaming services demand top-tier performance. Frame rates, buffering, and response times all directly impact user experience.
Bare metal enables:
- Edge-based game servers for reduced latency
- Real-time rendering pipelines for metaverse applications
- Dedicated infrastructure for VR and AR workloads
Platform engineers deploy bare metal nodes in regional data centers to serve content with minimal lag — giving players and viewers the responsiveness they expect.
4. Private Kubernetes and Container Platforms
Kubernetes is the backbone of many IDPs. Running Kubernetes on bare metal gives teams:
- Greater control over the orchestration layer
- Improved pod scheduling and resource allocation
- Higher security for regulated, multi-tenant environments
Organizations building Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms on bare metal can fine-tune performance while maintaining operational boundaries between tenants.
How Bare Metal Fits into the Modern Platform Engineering Stack
Bare metal isn’t an alternative to cloud-native tooling — it enhances it. Platform teams are integrating bare metal with modern technologies to build IDPs that are fast, scalable, and secure.
Developer Interface
Tools like Backstage, Port, or Humanitec form the front end of the platform. Hosting these interfaces on dedicated hardware improves responsiveness and scales better for large engineering organizations.
CI/CD and GitOps
CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or ArgoCD benefit from the performance of bare metal, especially when avoiding bottlenecks introduced by shared runners in virtual environments.
Orchestration Layer
Bare metal improves orchestration with tools like Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Nomad, giving ops teams complete control over node topology, scheduling algorithms, and resource isolation.
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
Platform teams using Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane can automate bare metal provisioning, treating physical servers like cloud instances — enabling true IaC even for non-virtual environments.
Observability and Security
With tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Vault, teams can monitor bare metal environments with less noise and more precision. Hardware-level isolation also strengthens security posture.
The Rise of Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS)
Traditional bare metal required long procurement cycles and manual setup. That’s no longer the case.
BMaaS providers like Equinix Metal, Hivelocity, and DedicatedNodes offer:
- On-demand bare metal provisioning via API
- Prebuilt OS images and automation support
- Infrastructure-as-Code integration
- Global presence in edge and metro locations
- Native support for DevOps workflows
This makes it easier than ever for platform teams to treat bare metal as part of their elastic, automated infrastructure — spinning up and tearing down environments as needed.
What’s Next: Trends Shaping 2025 and Beyond
1. AI-Native Internal Platforms
Future IDPs will include AI to suggest resource allocations, generate IaC code, and even predict outages. Bare metal will be critical for running these large language models and ML backends efficiently.
2. Composable Infrastructure
Platform engineers will orchestrate workloads across cloud, colo, and edge. Bare metal will act as the performance layer in this composable model — provisioned via API and managed alongside virtual resources.
3. Compliance-Driven Expansion
Industries like defense, banking, and healthcare require complete data sovereignty. Bare metal lets teams build secure, sovereign IDPs that meet the strictest regulatory standards — without sacrificing speed or agility.
Platform Engineering Needs Real Infrastructure
Platform engineering is reshaping how companies build and deploy software. Instead of cobbling together infrastructure on demand, it introduces a structured, product-based approach to internal tooling.
And in this transformation, bare metal is emerging not as a legacy relic, but as a future-ready foundation.
It offers:
- Raw performance for demanding workloads
- Granular control over compute, network, and storage
- Cost predictability for budget-conscious organizations
- API-powered automation for platform-native provisioning
In 2025, successful platform engineering teams will not ask whether to use cloud or on-premises infrastructure — they’ll orchestrate both. And bare metal will be their secret weapon for achieving the performance, control, and developer experience they need.
