Elastic Metal: From Game Servers to Global Infrastructure
The cloud revolution promised to democratize computing. Instead, it created new gatekeepers charging premium prices for commodity resources. It's time to break free.
Powering Web Applications Looked Different Across the Decades
In the 90s, you bought retail hardware and cobbled together enough on-premises machines to keep your applications running. Server rooms were hot, loud, and expensive. Scaling meant physical trips to data centers and crossing your fingers that your daisy-chained setup wouldn't fail.
The 2000s brought relief through colocation facilities and VMware's virtualization breakthrough. Hardware moved to professionally managed data centers while workloads shifted to virtual machines. You could finally scale without physically touching servers, but infrastructure management remained complex and capital-intensive.
The 2010s delivered the cloud revolution. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud promised infinite scale, pay-as-you-go pricing, and freedom from infrastructure management. Serverless computing emerged, letting developers focus purely on code. The future looked bright.
But innovation in the 2020s has largely stagnated. Despite massive advances in hardware efficiency and network technology, the hyperscalers have doubled down on lock-in tactics. Egress fees trap your data. Proprietary services create vendor dependency. Innovation has slowed to incremental improvements while prices continue climbing.
Both storage and IX transit costs have plummeted over the past decade, but AWS has kept prices steady.
The fundamental cost driver of cloud computing remains unchanged: customers pay a premium to transfer the underutilization risk of CapEx investments to cloud providers. Once customers accept paying $X for service Y, those savings rarely get passed through even when delivery costs drop 50%. While cloud providers occasionally reduce prices, these decreases rarely match the dramatic improvements in underlying hardware economics.
What Modern Applications Actually Need
Strip away the marketing noise, and modern applications have three fundamental requirements: cheap compute, seamless private networking, and ample storage.
Compute must be multi-region and elastic. Your applications need to scale rapidly when demand spikes and scale down just as quickly to control costs. High availability isn't optional—downtime costs more than redundancy. Developers want a unified interface like kubectl, not a maze of vendor-specific consoles.
Networking must be secure, reliable, and fast. Services need to discover and communicate with each other through private channels, not the public internet. Massive egress charges for accessing your own data are highway robbery. Your network should accelerate your business, not drain your budget.
Storage needs flexibility and reliability. Block storage for databases and persistent volumes, object storage for unstructured data and backups, file storage for shared access across applications—you need all three. Durability isn't negotiable when customer data is at stake. Managed database options for both SQL and NoSQL workloads should be table stakes, not premium add-ons.
Wrapping this together requires robust identity and access management, comprehensive security, and compliance frameworks. Most importantly, it all needs to be cheap and plentiful to enable the applications of tomorrow to take off.
The current cloud oligopoly fails this test. Premium pricing for commodity hardware. Vendor lock-in disguised as convenience. Innovation stifled by market concentration.
Hathora's Elastic Metal: The Modern Twist on VMware
Elastic Metal creates a compute and network substrate that allows you to plug heterogeneous providers into a single, unified fabric. Think of it as VMware for the cloud era—but where VMware sold packaged software to IT departments, we deliver a fully managed platform-as-a-service experience.
VMware revolutionized the 2000s by abstracting physical hardware into virtual machines. Elastic Metal revolutionizes the 2020s by abstracting cloud providers into a unified infrastructure layer. The difference? Today's customers don't want to manage software—they want managed offerings that just work.
We pair ultra-low-cost bare metal with monthly commitments alongside on-demand VMs, delivering both the economics of dedicated hardware and the flexibility of cloud computing. But unlike VMware's DIY approach, everything is managed for you. No more choosing between cost and agility. No more accepting hyperscaler tax as the price of doing business.
The magic happens through a standardized kubectl interface that works across all providers and a private networking mesh that's automatically created between all compute nodes. Your applications can seamlessly communicate whether they're running on bare metal in Dallas, VMs in Amsterdam, or containers in Singapore—all through secure, private networking that never touches the public internet.
Storage integrates directly across the platform with block and object options, giving you the performance and durability you need without vendor lock-in. Your data remains yours, accessible at commodity prices rather than ransom rates—all through a managed service that handles the complexity.
The unified fabric means you're not managing multiple providers, APIs, billing relationships, or software installations. One interface deploys everywhere. One private network connects everything. One experience—powered by the best infrastructure providers globally rather than the most politically connected ones. Getting started and scaling should be easier than hyperscalers, not harder.
Proven at Scale in Gaming
We validated this approach in gaming—one of the most performance-sensitive and cost-sensitive use cases imaginable. Our game server orchestration product is built on top of our Elastic Metal platform. We're serving millions of users with workloads running on thousands of cores across 14 regions. Our customers see 60% cost savings while maintaining the sub-20ms latency requirements that make or break multiplayer experiences.
If it works for gaming, it works for everything. We want to build upon this strong foundation that has worked well for gaming and bring it to new markets as well.
What's Next
We're opening up the Elastic Metal platform directly for customers who want flexibility in the workloads they run. But we'll also continue expanding domain-specific products like game servers, CI workers, and two new vertical products we’ll be launching this year.
We're onboarding our first batch of design customers beyond gaming, all of whom are tired of paying massive overheads to hyperscalers for running simple workloads at scale. These companies are seeing 50%+ cost savings on tens of millions in spend—the kind of economics that makes CFOs and CTOs pay attention.
The future of computing won't be controlled by three companies in Seattle, Redmond, and Mountain View. It will be built on open protocols, competitive markets, and infrastructure that works for builders, not just shareholders.
If cloud economics are no longer working for your business and you want a fresh take on what modern infrastructure economics should look like, get in touch.
The revolution starts with breaking free from hyperscaler dependency. Elastic Metal is how you do it.
