Before "the cloud," there was one option: buy physical servers, put them in a room, and from that moment on they were entirely your problem.
That's bare metal: running your apps directly on hardware you own. In the series analogy, it's owning a house. You get total control and every bit of performance the machine has. You also get the leaky roof.
Bare metal had a hidden problem that nobody put on the invoice: most of that expensive hardware spent most of its life doing almost nothing. Companies bought for their busiest day of the year, then paid to power and cool idle machines the rest of the year.
That problem, plus the weeks-long wait for every new server, is what every technology after it was invented to fix. Part 2 walks through the trade-offs, and why they still matter when you pick a cloud setup today:
— JC
