Back

Scalable bare metal service overview

Table of contents

Introduction

Scalable bare metal is a separate service from dedicated servers, offering highly reliable servers with fixed configurations, hourly billing, and a unique operational model. This service combines the power of dedicated servers with the scalability of cloud solutions, allowing businesses to access powerful computing resources on demand without long-term commitments.

This service is currently in closed beta. To gain access and place an order, please contact your account manager or customer support.

Concepts

  • Hourly billing model: pay only for actual usage, allowing for the cost-optimized management of unpredictable workloads, budget planning, and avoiding over-provisioning of resources.

  • Consistent performance: complete control over hardware and applications with no intermediaries. Each server is exclusively yours, ensuring predictable performance and eliminating the issue of "noisy neighbors".

  • Efficient infrastructure management: use our API to automate and optimize deployment, scaling, and management of your bare metal servers, seamlessly integrating with existing DevOps tools and processes.

Use case

  • Businesses can quickly scale their server capacity to handle sudden traffic spikes without long-term commitments.

  • Developers can deploy servers as needed for testing purposes.

  • Researchers and data scientists can access high-performance servers for intensive computational tasks, such as training machine learning models or large language models, without incurring unnecessary long-term costs.

  • When integrated with managed Kubernetes services, hourly billed servers can be used to dynamically add worker nodes to a Kubernetes cluster, providing the resources needed to efficiently manage varying workloads.

Available features

Support for core dedicated server functions:

  • Operating system installation (excluding Windows)

  • Authentication method selection

  • VNC console support

Integration with network infrastructure:

  • Ability to add a server to an L2 segment

  • Use of load balancers

  • Use of a firewalls

  • Default provision of highest uplinks with redundancy

Management via API:

Quotes

  • The default quota allows for up to 5 servers of a specific SBM configuration per account

  • The default quota allows for up to 10 different scalable bare metal configurations in total per account

Billing

The scalable bare metal service is offered on a post-paid, hourly billing model. Your account balance must cover the previous billing period and include enough funds to operate each server for an additional 12 hours.

There is no traffic commitment: you pay per-GB. All billing services related to scalable bare metal are billed hourly, including the minutes when the service starts and ends.

Getting started

How to order a scalable bare metal

To order a scalable bare metal, complete the following steps:

1. Go to the customer portal

2. In the left-hand menu, navigate to Scalable Bare Metal

scalable bare metal menu in client dashboard

3. Click Add server and select the location

4. In the Flavor section, choose an available configuration from the list

5. Choose the operating system. Please note, Windows-based OS is unavailable for the scalable bare metal service

6. Choose the authentication method, SSH key, quantity, and configuration name

7. To place an order, click Order

8. In the My cart section, review the order details and click the Buy now button

The selected configuration will be available after the provisioning procedure.