Combining the features of both cloud hosting, and bare-metal servers, offers most of these, whilst still conveying the performance advantages.
Some bare-metal cloud servers may run a hypervisor or containers, e.g., to simplify maintenance or provide additional layers of isolation.
BMaaS software typically takes over the lifecycle management of the equipment in a datacenter (compute, storage and network Switches, firewalls, load balancers and others).
Increasingly BMaaS software is used internally to reduce the costs associated with lifecycle management of equipment for enterprises with large fleets of servers.
Note that in some implementations, the storage component is external to the systems using iSCSI blurring the lines between BMaaS and composable infrastructure.
This allows the user to choose the size and performance of the node's storage in a manner similar to classical virtualized Infrastructure as a Service offerings.
Single large computers, mainframes or minis, were commonly housed in centralised locations and their services shared through a bureau.
The shift to cheap commodity PCs in the 1980s changed this as the market expanded, and most organisations, even the smallest, began to purchase or lease their own computers.
Popular growth of the internet, and particularly the web, in the 1990s encouraged the practice of hosting in data centres, where many customers shared the facilities of single servers.