Cloud Workflow, Bare Metal Economics: Why Moving the Steady Core Doesn’t Change How You Work
- by Ned Pope
Key takeaways
- Shifting steady-state workloads that don’t require elastic burst capabilities to single-tenant bare metal helps SaaS teams right-size their investments and optimize costs.
- Hivelocity provides infrastructure-as-code (IaC) capabilities and API-based provisioning so that teams can keep the same processes and workflows they’re used to in the cloud.
Among SaaS companies, hybrid infrastructure has a reputation for being complicated to operate. The assumption is that splitting a stack across cloud and dedicated hardware means running two systems, with two sets of tools and two teams to staff them.
With Hivelocity bare-metal infrastructure as a service, that’s not the case. Our SaaS customers can leverage both parts of the hybrid equation from a single operating model.
That means the application tier stays on cloud, where traffic is bursty and elasticity is worth paying for. Meanwhile, the steady core, the database tier, multi-tenant clusters, and the workers that run at constant utilization move to dedicated hardware priced for sustained load. Customers manage everything as one—and dramatically increase cost efficiency in the process.
The Control Plane Is Cloud-Class
The new, unified operating model works because bare metal no longer behaves like colocation from a decade ago.
With Hivelocity, provisioning is API-driven. New servers are deployed in under an hour and configured through post-install scripts. We offer comprehensive IaC capabilities, enabling the same workflows your engineers already know.
The myVelocity portal and the public API expose the same operations, so anything done in the UI can be automated in code. Self-serve networking, private VLANs, IPMI access, and bandwidth monitoring run through the same interface. The pricing model changes when the steady core moves; the daily workflow does not.
One Operating Model, Two Kinds of Hardware
This is what makes the shift to hybrid defensible to a platform team: Hivelocity drops into the IaC pipeline the team already runs.
A bare metal database node gets treated the same way as a cloud instance, in the same repository, behind the same review process and the same CI checks. Provisioning, teardown, and configuration happen in code, not through a ticket queue. The bare metal side of the estate doesn’t get a separate provisioning pattern or its own runbook. The shared layer is the tooling, the API, and the IaC workflow, rather than a single console stretched across providers.
The bottom line: your team keeps working with the tools they already know, and the parts of the stack that moved are managed like the parts that stayed.
Start Enabling Enhanced Infrastructure Efficiency Today
The Hivelocity SaaS Bundle—a purpose-built offering to help SaaS teams realize enhanced efficiency and optimized performance—has a consistent control plane across the three tiers. Everything is backed up by 24/7/365 support from real humans.
The same API, IaC capabilities, and portal cover our entire offering:
- Engineering Compute (Tier 1) for dev, staging, and CI
- Production Compute (Tier 2) for the database tier and multi-tenant clusters
- Hi-Scale Compute (Tier 3) for multi-region production
The workload to move first is usually the database, which is typically the one teams are most happy to remove from the cloud bill. You bring it into your existing IaC configuration and deploy it the way you deploy everything else.
If you’re ready to assess the possibilities of hybrid IT infrastructure leveraging Hivelocity bare metal, our team would be thrilled to discuss how your organization can benefit.
Contact us today to get started.
FAQ
Q: Does moving to bare metal mean changing our IaC workflow?
A: No. Hivelocity’s IaC capabilities support the dedicated server line, and full myVelocity API parity means anything you do in the portal can be automated in code. You work with a bare metal server the same way you work with a cloud instance, inside the same pipeline you already run.
Q: Can one platform team manage both sides of a hybrid setup?
A: Yes. The shared layer is the tooling, the API, and your IaC workflow, so the same team manages both through the same pipeline. The bare metal half doesn’t need a separate provisioning pattern, its own runbook, or a new team to operate it.
Q: How fast can we provision bare metal compared to cloud?
A: New servers deploy in under an hour and are configured through cloud-init and post-install scripts—the same automation you’d use on cloud. Provisioning and teardown run through the API and our IaC capabilities, so a server is brought up and configured via code, the same way a cloud instance is. What changes is the hardware, not the workflow.
