As companies transition from centralized to decentralized architectures, driven by the growing complexity and volume of data, they are re-evaluating how they store, process, and deliver data to end-users and applications. Those embracing a “cloud-first” approach have discovered that while it simplifies certain tasks, it also accelerates expenditure due to the virtually unlimited infrastructure available at their fingertips. This realization is prompting a careful reconsideration of cloud strategies to balance efficiency with cost-effectiveness.
Here are some architectures our clients have implemented, reflecting broader industry trends. Amidst the current economic volatility, companies continue to operate with constrained budgets, prioritizing the maximization of value for every dollar spent. This focus on cost-effectiveness and efficiency is a top priority in their strategic planning.
Decentralized
In this architecture, data initially lands in a non-major cloud object store, such as Cloudflare’s R2 storage, offering S3-comparable storage at lower costs with zero egress fees, thus avoiding lock-in with any specific cloud provider. The data is then transferred to servers at bare-metal.io for high-performance processing by various OLAP tools or other software, enabling millisecond response times for applications and diverse use cases. Finally, if necessary, aggregated data can be moved to one of the major cloud platforms to support existing cloud-based applications.
Due to security and latency requirements, another option if you want to control your own storage is a storage server running Minio s3 compatible object storage. Minio is the leader in self-hosted object storage. Replication to another server located in the same data center or to one of bare-metal.io’s data centers or a alternative 3rd party is a common practice for disaster recovery or even load balancing. Bare-metal.io can provide servers with a large amount of storage including assistance in setting up replication to one of our other data centers.
Hybrid
In this architecture, data is sent to both a major cloud provider as well as bare-metal.io to serve certain use cases like real-time analytics, fraud detection or intrusion detection. (see our use cases section for examples) The costs are greatly reduced by providing bare metal servers as a fraction of the cost as AWS, Azure and GCP provide. No cloud provider can come close to the value and performance that we offer and it’s easy to pair these infrastructures together to provide the best solution for their customers and end users.
Powering Big Data Applications
Analyzing billions of records is a regular day occurrence these days. Doing it without paying millions of dollars in traditional cloud vendors is a barrier for most businesses. Bare-metal.io provides low cost, high performing infrastructure to power these big data software applications at a fraction of the cost of the “big guys” as illustrated in the diagram below. It doesn’t make sense to host these types of applications that require a tremendous amount of compute, memory and high performaning storage in one of the 3 major clouds.
