Seems like this company has gotten a lot of hype but what so they actually do? Cloud hosting? Or selling physical servers? Both of those things sound like a terrible business tho..
I think Outpost is a great hybrid-ish solution for those companies with workloads in AWS that want to supplement that with on-premise workloads using the same APIs and tools they are already used to.
The use cases I see for Oxide are, like other have said, are for hyperscalers or hosting providers who want to have their own on-premise infrastructure that isn’t tied to another entity like AWS. Whether that’s because you have the in-house talent to manage it or for compliance reasons it’s required it does have a niche.
But if outpost was nearly the same price as oxide, wouldn’t you always want access to the full AWS or GCP infrastructure and world class control plane versus something bespoke that only works in your own data center.
I think what Oxide has to bank on is that this isn’t a market that Google, Microsoft or AWS want to really compete in (e.g. it may require these companies to undercut themselves too much).
Wikipedia has a short page with a different definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperscale_computing
Same problem with Anthos.
You can work around the limitations by having a million points of presence with them and splitting up your workloads but there’s real costs associated with that model. Running 1 rack in 100 DCs is a lot harder than 10 racks in 10 DCs.
My gut is that they are for places that need on-Prem for compliance purposes for certain parts of their stack
But that seems entirely due to AWS not currently being interested in this market versus something fundamentally limiting about their tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-converged_infrastructure
Oxide racks won't be able to use anything other than Oxide computers (or maybe eventually third party computers that follow Oxide standards).
It’s the kind of thing I would expect Nvidia or Dell to become big at as well, and Bryan Cantrill has enough leverage to pique my interest significantly here.
An example is nvida's bluefield, there are others
That sort of thing is being used in a few areas, can even run ESXi on them.
There was a fun article on servethehome a while back using them to build an arm cluster (Link: https://www.servethehome.com/building-the-ultimate-x86-and-a... )