Deploying Ruby Apps with Bare Metal: A New Type of VM

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CenturyLink is a company providing multiple Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. When choosing which service to use for a particular application, there are basically two tracks. The first track is AppFog, which is a pure PaaS like you know and love. AppFog provides the infrastructure and you supply the application and data. AppFog supplies a Command Line Interface (CLI) for deployment, as well as a nice dashboard for monitoring your resources.

The other tract offered by CenturyLink is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, both with virtual machines and another product called Bare Metal, which we’ll cover in this article. Bare Metal offers "the computing power of a physical server, plus the automation and pay-as-you-go flexibility of virtual machines". Bare Metal servers are NOT shared VMs, so you don't have to worry about sharing resources. However, they operate like a VM, so you get the responsiveness and rapid deployment of VMs with the isolation of a physical machine.

You might use Bare Metal for a database server or an application that doesn't fit well into other virtualized environments. Tasks like batch computing, where you need a large amount of computational resources for short bursts are great for Bare Metal. Also, items like analytics are a good fit, as you can manage the complexity of software like Hadoop and the unique needs of analytics computing.

Another interesting feature is that Bare Metal servers are integrated into the CenturyLink Cloud, right along services like AppFog. This allows you to mix PaaS applications, databases, expensive computing tasks, and just about anything else, managing them all from the same dashboard. To my knowledge, no other PaaS offers such a menu, and you'd have to do a ton of work on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to get the same convenience.

Here is a comparison of Bare Metal servers to other server options.

In today's post, I will walk through creating a Bare Metal server and deploying a (very) simple Rails application to it.

Setup

Before we start on our journey, you'll need an account on CenturyLink in order to follow along. There are free trials (they do require a payment method, FYI). So, head over to the CenturyLink site and click "Free Trial". Follow the sign up procedure and you're ready to go.

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by Glenn Goodrich via SitePoint