I managed a bare metal cluster of 5x 128 GB RAM for a fintech.
Using bare metal servers without VM layer is actually a simplification. Cutting out a layer that's not strictly necessary.
Test environments were in AWS. There is a load balancer outside of the cluster (highly available HAProxy as a service). I wouldn't say it's particularly difficult or easy. It's pretty cost effective. After the initial setup, scripting and testing, is done, you spend at most a few hours per month with maintenance and the difference in cost of severs is huge. Also, unmetered bandwidth.
The pain points are mostly storage (nothing beats redundant network storage ala EBS) and having to plan at least a few months in advance because you're renting larger chunks of HW.
Using bare metal servers without VM layer is actually a simplification. Cutting out a layer that's not strictly necessary.
Test environments were in AWS. There is a load balancer outside of the cluster (highly available HAProxy as a service). I wouldn't say it's particularly difficult or easy. It's pretty cost effective. After the initial setup, scripting and testing, is done, you spend at most a few hours per month with maintenance and the difference in cost of severs is huge. Also, unmetered bandwidth.
The pain points are mostly storage (nothing beats redundant network storage ala EBS) and having to plan at least a few months in advance because you're renting larger chunks of HW.