Bare Metal Cloud – Part 5 – Performance Comparison to Virtual Machines

One of the advertised advantages of renting bare metal servers in the cloud compared to using virtual machines on dedicated or shared hardware is their better performance. That sounds right but how much faster is an entry level bare metal server in a data center with a few CPU cores compared to virtual machines running … Continue reading Bare Metal Cloud – Part 5 – Performance Comparison to Virtual Machines

Bare Metal Cloud – Part 4 – Getting a Serial Console When the Network is Broken

When you are working with virtual machines in the cloud, I’m sure you’ve come across a situation in which you thought you had a great idea to reconfigure the network stack and ended up with the VM not being reachable anymore. As a last resort, one can always turn to the virtual machine manager and … Continue reading Bare Metal Cloud – Part 4 – Getting a Serial Console When the Network is Broken

Bare Metal Cloud – Part 3 – Several Public IPs – Macvtap vs. Bridging

In the previous post on the topic, I’ve had a look at how several virtual machines on my bare metal cloud server in a data center can share a single public IPv4 address. Public IPv4 addresses are expensive these days, so in many cases, sharing an IPv4 address and using non-standard ports for web servers … Continue reading Bare Metal Cloud – Part 3 – Several Public IPs – Macvtap vs. Bridging

Bare Metal in the Cloud – Part 1 – Let’s Rent Hardware

So far, the public cloud has pretty much been ‘virtual machines’ for me, with varying numbers of CPUs, memory and storage, depending on the application. Recently, however, I’ve been looking for a way run copies of my home cloud based virtual machines (VMs) and Docker containers in a data center for redundancy purposes. For this … Continue reading Bare Metal in the Cloud – Part 1 – Let’s Rent Hardware

The Old Cloud – CPU and Disk Performance

In the previous, I have taken a first look at Scaleway’s bare metal servers that are around 10 years old at the time of writing. Compared to other companies offering more recent hardware, their prices are significantly lower for some of their configurations. Despite the dated hardware, the offer is still interesting to me, as … Continue reading The Old Cloud – CPU and Disk Performance

Nextcloud – Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04

I’m running four Nextcloud instances, all of them in separate virtual machines on Ubuntu 20.04. The problem: Ubuntu 20.04, despite still being rather young, comes with PHP 7.4, which has been declared end of live recently, and Nextcloud has announced that they will no longer support this PHP version in their next release. So while … Continue reading Nextcloud – Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04

The Cloud Based 5GC – From Theory To Practice

Last year I wrote about a 5G Americas whitepaper that describes how 3GPP has standardized the 5G core in a way that lends itself for cloud based implementation. In short, that means that control plane functions are split into microservices, deployed on bare metal clusters in containers and managed with Kubernetes. So far the theory. … Continue reading The Cloud Based 5GC – From Theory To Practice