Hacker News Reader

Comment by ellieh | Hacker News Reader

tbf they are probably looking for customers with cloud spend ending in 'm'

I wonder what's the selling point at that scale. If your ~monthly~ cloud spend ends in "M", you can easily justify hiring the talent needed to wrangle conventional bare-metal (in fact you can do so at much lower spends, but at these spends it becomes a rounding error).

Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.

VC or private equity fueled companies are weird. At my place we are spending 8 figures a year just in AWS, and it's not like they planning to move to bare metal but, they're in fact removing stuff from their old datacenter. And that bill doesn't include some of the other SaaS like Mongo or Elastic.

With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, or discover some unused servers... the savings (that are barely a rounding error on their bill) could pay for a whole year of an engineer or a bunch of servers that could power a good chunk of their production traffic.

That's just any company with serious money.

(Former Oxide)

An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing.

This matters when your various vendors start pointing at each other when something goes wrong. Oxide is truly “one throat to choke” in a way others just aren’t, and stand by that quality.

(Not to mention other various efficiencies, like power, or removing things like the BIOS and BMC junk that’s in basically every other server you buy right now. And the ability to send attenuation from boot up through the host OS. Just tons of things they’re differentiated on that your in house team just isn’t going to do.)

The more I read responses on here, the more I realize how much marketing work oxide needs to do even for the HN segment, which is very bizarre to me.

For me, Oxide is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the computing market in a long time.

Hacker News has a wide variety of people in it, but certainly leans more toward software expertise.

"attestation" not "attenuation," thank you autocorrect :/

Its not about bare metal, its about owning the whole stack and giving visibility into every nook and corner, and then supporting that open sourced code. Every network switch, every interconnect, every piece or firmware or software they can attest to because they built it themselves, and that is worth its weight in gold to high criticality industries and governments. They can give you the provenance for every single hardware and software component. Every chip.

If you can roll around those possibilities in your head, you start to see how absolutely unique this is and why these extremely sensitive and important customers and industries want this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com