Interesting point. In my experience buy vs rent depends on the company size.
Which bare metal providers can you recommend? How much control do you have over your network?
Which bare metal providers can you recommend? How much control do you have over your network?
For the type of application that I run, where our demand is not very elastic, I find it very cost-effective and more flexible (as long as you're comfortable with administrating KVM and ZFS). I also like that with ZFS, I can easily sync snapshots between providers at the filesystem-level.
I don't tend to care that much what control I have over the network as most of the systems I deploy are set up to allow us to tie in compute or storage resources "anywhere", which means we put encrypted overlay networks in place for all inter-server traffic no matter what to get a consistent fabric to build on top of. It costs a bit of CPU resource, but I've yet to run into anywhere where's it's been an issue.