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.
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.
Wikipedia has a short page with a different definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperscale_computing
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).
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.