For decades, on-premises installations meant application developers and systems administrators had access to this pre-boot sequence, whether it was for easing asset management, helping to recover from failure, or fine tuning systems for performance. The move to the cloud meant losing access to this important level of control, as cloud providers only offer administrative credentials to a server only once the operating system has loaded.
“Our virtual machines look and feel more like the bare metal, all instances include dedicated CPU cores, dedicated RAM and now BIOS-level access just like the physical servers that IT admins are used to, except they get all of the advantages of cloud computing from the price/performance leader,” said ProfitBricks Co-founder, CEO, and CTO Achim Weiss. “We want to give our customers as much control of their virtual data center as they would have in a traditional on-premises data center, but without the hassle of the capital expenditures and never-ending hardware maintenance. With this new feature we’re making cloud computing an even more attractive alternative for the enterprise.”