A physical server in the cloud dedicated entirely to a single customer, with no virtualization layer or shared resources. Like renting an entire house instead of an apartment, bare metal gives you direct access to the hardware — every CPU core, every byte of RAM, and every disk operation — without the overhead of a hypervisor. This is essential for workloads requiring maximum performance, hardware-level security, or specialized configurations. AWS offers EC2 Bare Metal instances, Azure provides BareMetal Infrastructure, GCP has Sole-Tenant Nodes, and OCI is particularly known for its Bare Metal Compute instances with high-performance networking.
A financial trading firm deploys their high-frequency trading algorithm on bare metal servers to eliminate the microseconds of latency added by virtualization. With direct hardware access, their trades execute 40% faster than on virtual machines, and they can fine-tune CPU cache settings and network card configurations that aren't accessible through a hypervisor.