With bare metal, you get direct access to the hardware and access to virtually 100 percent of the hardware’s resources without any major overhead. They also allow AWS users to run their own virtualization stacks, which also gives them more control over their cloud servers. In addition, though, this now also opens up EC2 to applications that users couldn’t previously license for virtualized environment or couldn’t get support for.
AWS is launching these bare metal instances as part of its i3 instance family but expects to bring them to a wider range of instance families over time.These new instances are now going into public preview but developers will have to sign up for this preview.
The bare metal instances will still be able to make use of all the usual EC2 services, AWS’s VP of global infrastructure Peter Desantis noted in a keynote at the company’s re:Invent developer conference.
