[gumby]

They talk about running on "bare metal" but when I followed that link it looked like they were simply running under Ubuntu. Is it so much a given that everything is going to be virtualized?

When I think of "bare metal" I think of a single image with disk management, network stack, and what few services they want all running in supervisory mode. Basically the architecture of an embedded system.

[wmf]

Yes, it is assumed that all startups are running in EC2 us-east-1 and "bare metal" is the accepted term for non-virtualized systems.

[colemickens]

I don't get it. What else is bare metal meant to mean? "bare metal" = "embedded system"? What does "embedded system" mean then? I guess my age / cloud-nativeness is showing?

[unwind]

In the embedded space, there often isn't any type of OS or kernel between the application code and the hardware resources ("the metal").

If I want to send out a character through the board's serial debugging port, I don't do an open()/write()/close(), I poke the UART's transmit register.

When they said "bare metal", I too thought they ran without OS which had been kind of cool.

[gumby]

Thanks for the clarification. Yet another dilution of a technical term, sigh.

I was quite excited when I read it, and felt quite let down when I followed up.

[Veen]

In the hosting world, bare metal generally means dedicated servers and clusters of dedicated servers. It's just a shorthand for "not cloud".

[malodyets]

I wondered the same thing: "Wow, they have their own git kernel?" But no.