IaaS clouds have been popularized through heavy usage of virtual machines. Recent initiatives are targeting bare metal servers with an API, so we get the best of both worlds—on-demand servers through an API and incredible performance through direct access to the hardware. https://www.packet.net/ is a bare metal IaaS provider (https://www.scaleway.com/ is another) very well supported by Terraform with an awesome global network. Within minutes we have new hardware ready and connected to the network.
We'll build a fully automated and scalable Docker Swarm cluster, so we can operate highly scalable and performant workloads on bare metal: this setup can scale thousands of containers in just a few minutes. This cluster is composed of Type 0 machines (4 cores and 8 GB RAM), for one manager and 2 nodes, totaling 12 cores and 24 GB of RAM, but we can use more performant machines if we want: the same cluster with Type 2 machines will...