[irq]: techie interrupted

“But, but…” I hear you cry, “Without a hypervisor don’t you lose a lot of manageability?” The answer is yes. But that’s not an argument for why clouds and virtualization are inseparable. You’re merely observing that some cloud implementations are more manageable than others. Virtualization brings many benefits, such as the ability to transparently shift workloads to different hardware within the cloud in a transparent fashion, for load balancing and disaster recovery (think of the live migration technologies supported by the various hypervisors).

But bare metal clouds also have interesting properties such as increased performance. If you want every CPU cycle your cloud can deliver (think large data analytics workloads), you might want to ditch the hypervisor and run your application directly on the metal. You can still manage your physical servers as a pooled resource within a cloud operating model, offering self-service access with accounting and charge-back of resource usage.