10 ms·

Somebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is cool but I don't get the business model, it seems deeply impractical. * You buy your own server

Somebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is cool but I don't get the business model, it seems deeply impractical. * You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud. * Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch. * AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch. * Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here. * Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups. So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now. I don't get it, it just seems like a bunch of geeks playing with VC money?

dcre 3y ago
It is simply false that everything has gone cloud. The whole argument falls down on the first premise. Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them.
- elishah 3y ago
  > Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them. This strikes me as at least as much of a leap as "everything has gone cloud." Containers are... kind of a thing. And while there certainly are use cases for VMs over containers, they're comparatively niche. This product seems as if it'd be a better fit for every real use case I've ever seen if it were a prebuilt kubernetes cluster rather than a prebuilt VM hypervisor.
  - closeparen 3y ago
    That’s a Silicon Valley bubble perspective. Everything from your kid’s school to your car dealer to your automaker is VMWare.
    - lkjdsklf 3y ago
      > Everything from your kid’s school to your car dealer to your automaker is VMWare. While true, they also aren't buying $500k+ rack. They're running vmware on a much smaller scale.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      This is true, but I wouldn't underestimate the penetration of Cloud and Container First deployments. A number of customers I've worked with in Biotech, Telecom, Retail, Defense, and Financial sectors have either completed their cloud transformation or have ongoing 3-5 year timelines to make such a move. On the mid-market side, I've been seeing organizations increasingly offload the entire IT operation to MSPs instead of managing their own ESXi server. The MSP might often be using VMWare, but a number are also transitioning away from that. I think it's premature to say container and cloud first deployments are the norm, but the change and transition is rapidly occurring.
      - closeparen 3y ago
        I would expect most of those cloud deployments to be VMs not containers.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        It's 60-40 VMs-Containers in my experience. A lot of this is highly dependent on the kind of app you are migrating as well as the scale needs.
- dataangel 3y ago
  In 15 years of professional experience I've never worked at a place that uses VMs on the servers they own. They're just going to run Linux off an image so what's the point? You might want to look outside your niche.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dijit 3y ago
    Is this true? I have honestly never worked in any company >50 people that didn't use VMs on owned hardware in some capacity, though usually not the main product. IT departments typically love VMs (and vmware)- AD machines are most often hosted on VMs on VMWare.
    - dataangel 3y ago
      Two of the companies I've worked for have run gigantic clusters and had >100 employees and didn't really use VMs. One of them used one to build some third party libs, but it was basically an implementation detail of one script. Everything on the servers was still bare metal. You already have user separations, permissions/privileges, etc. It's not clear what a VM adds other than as a hack to allowed installed packages to diverge which doesn't matter if you vendor them.
  - TillE 3y ago
    Unless you're running at 100% load most of the time, it's atypical to run a server on bare metal these days. Much more flexible, maintainable, and cost-saving to stick servers in a VM. We sell a product that used to be delivered as a rack mountable server, but now I think nearly all our customers want a VM instead.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      I worked for a SaaS that ran a hybrid infra, partially on metal. Each rack had N blade enclosures, which together made up a logical isolated unit, with each blade running something. New blades would get provisioned automatically, then Terraform and Puppet handled their configuration. I don’t remember utilization exactly, but I think most of the blades were reasonably committed. That said, when I left they were moving from a hybrid model to entire cloud, so apparently the cost:flexibility ratio wasn’t to peoples’ liking.
- faitswulff 3y ago
  ~Bandcamp~ Basecamp is doing just the opposite and leaving the cloud, in fact: https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...
  - packetslave 3y ago
    Basecamp (DHH) not Bandcamp (Derek Sivers)
    - faitswulff 3y ago
      Thanks!
    - dewey 3y ago
      Isn’t Derek Sivers CD Baby?
      - faitswulff 3y ago
        This thread is just a litany of errors
      - packetslave 3y ago
        well heck. yes, sivers@ founded CD Baby, not Bandcamp.
qingcharles 3y ago
Many companies are leaving cloud hosting due to spiraling costs. Even well-knowns like 37signals: https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb It's nice to have options. Cloud good. Self-hosting good. Middle options good.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  My mind also jumped to this post. But can you name another company that did so recently?
  - dijit 3y ago
    most companies will not be so loud about it. Double that for companies that were loud about their cloud usage, usually that came with some usage discounts on the side- on-prem does not, and it also looks bad to pivot anyway; so why be loud?
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Why does it look bad? It is perfectly reasonable that at the time of the switch to the cloud, that it made good business sense. It is also perfectly reasonable that after some time that the landscapes have changed, and it is now good business sense to leave the cloud. If at the time of the switch to the cloud the pricing was cheap, then sure, but we all know that prices are not written in stone and will pretty much always increase. At some point, those increases become untenable. It's the nature of tech. We used to use thin clients connected to a server, then went to dedicated workstations, and currently we're back to connections to servers.
electroly 3y ago
Addressing #2 and #3, a "hybrid cloud" architecture can include a site-to-site VPN or direct fiber connection to a cloud. In AWS, Direct Connect data transfer pricing effectively makes your on-prem DC or colocation facility into an availability zone in your AWS Region. Direct Connect is $0.02/GB egress (out of AWS) and free ingress (into AWS), which is a better deal than cross-AZ data transfer within the AWS Region. Cross-AZ within an AWS Region is effectively $0.02/GB in both directions. This way, you can run your big static workloads on-prem to save money, and run your fiddly dynamic workloads in AWS and continue to use S3. That said, if a hybrid cloud architecture is your plan and you desire a managed rack-at-a-time experience, AWS Outposts would seem to be the safer pick. They've been shipping for years and they have public pricing that you can look at. I'm not sure that Oxide specifically has an opening for customers who want to keep their cloud. I wish them luck. https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/
nighmi 3y ago
> they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) This is an amazing plus in my eyes. Solaris systems are amazing.
sergiotapia 3y ago
Cloud was a low interest rate phenomena. I predict a return to metal servers and managed data centers.
oldtownroad 3y ago
Part of the appeal of the cloud over on-premise is that on-premise is not just expensive, but hard: oxide’s product isn’t just on-premise hardware, it’s on-premise hardware _that is easy_*. If on-premise was just expensive, it would be so much more appealing — because the cloud is expensive too! Most every software engineer has worked in an org where spending six figures per month on AWS or GCP is totally normal and acceptable because the alternative, buying hardware, is this awful scary unknown that could be cheaper but could also blow the entire company up. If oxide can solve that, suddenly on-premise becomes much more attractive. Yes, people are hooked on the cloud, but not because of data transfer… because it’s easy. * well, the first few deployments might not be easy but that’s true of anything new.
- thinkmassive 3y ago
  100% agree with you Also, what this person said :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552245
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Not OP, but what differentiates Oxide from VMWare or Dell? I can get pretty competitive quotes from both if I wanted to build my own DC, or if had much more niche HPC requirements I could go with NVIDIA.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    top-to-bottom integration and fully open-source, basically. That's a pretty good value proposition, though it does depend on how much premium you pay for it.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    I hate to link this comment agin in this thread, but I wrote a comment about almost exactly this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
  - rapsey 3y ago
    The enterprises running VMWare I know run completely shit hardware and getting outrageously fleeced on any updates they want to do.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bcantrill 3y ago
I'm not sure what "weird EE side quests" you're referring to, but anyone interested in learning what we've done in terms of hardware should listen to the team in its own voice, e.g. in their description of our board bringup.[0] [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-the-bringup-lab-2021-12-06 https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...
tw04 3y ago
>* You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud. This is very much not true and seems to be a result of people in the valley thinking the rest of the world operates like the valley. In the rest of the world I've found mature businesses that bought into the "cloud is the best" quickly started doing the math on their billing rate and realized there is a VERY small subset of their business that has any reason to be in the cloud. Actually one of the very best use-cases of public cloud I've seen is a finance firm that sticks new products into the cloud until they hit maturity so they can properly right-size the on-prem permanent home for them. And if those products never take off, they just move on to the next one. They're willing to pay a premium for 12-18 months because they can justify it financially. >* Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch. And yet company's do it all the time. I think you'll again find mature fortune 500s can do the math on the exit cost vs. staying cost and quickly justify leaving in a reasonable time window. >* AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch. And as you've seen plenty of people here point out: most of those services tend to be overrated. OK, so you've got database as a service: except now you can't actually tune it to your specific workload. And $/query, even ignoring performance, is astronomically higher than building your own and paying a DBA to manage it unless you're a 2-man startup. >* Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here. I don't know of a single enterprise that has run anything BUT VMs for the last decade. Other than Mainframe (which you can argue is actually just VMs in a different name), and some HFT-type applications that need the lowest possible latency at all costs, it's all virtualized. As for Illumos: why do you care? Oxide is supporting and maintaining it as an appliance. Tape has been "dead" for 2 decades. FreeBSD has been "dead" since the early 2000s. It's only dead for people that don't deal with enterprise IT. >* Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups. I have no doubt they've done their research, and I can tell you from my industry experience there is a large cross-section of people who want an easy button. There's a reason why companys like Nutanix exist and have the market cap they do - but they could never actually get the whole way there because they got wrapped up in the "everything is software defined!!!". Which works really well until you realize that you're left to your own devices on networking. >So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now. I mean no disrespect but I get the impression you haven't ever worked with a fortune 500 that's outside of the valley. This is EXACTLY what they all want. They aren't going to run their entire datacenter on this, but when the datacenter is measured in hundreds to thousands of servers, they've got plenty of workloads that it's a perfect fit for
cjalmeida 3y ago
A lot of corprotation have a very hard time moving workloads to the cloud due to regulations alone. In some places it's a compliance nightmare, a landing page with "trust me, we're secure" from AWS is far from enough for legal counselors, auditors and the CISO.
- ec109685 3y ago
  Those corporations are dumb. Way more resources are spent making AWS secure than could ever be spent on bespoke security implementations.
rcxdude 3y ago
This is for people who want a turnkey cloud that they own, not rent. Renting is really expensive: you could probably buy a few of these racks a year for the cost of renting the same amount of compute on AWS. You also get a software stack which gives you the tools to manage the hardware without growing your own, with an extremely high level of trust. It's extremely well aimed at the companies which can afford the racks, because operating at that scale you are being fleeced by the hyperscalers.
doctor_eval 3y ago
My own experience here was with a rack of servers in a DC running a fairly heavy workload for a number of customers. Long story short, despite pressure to move from our parent company, there was literally no dimension - services, finance, performance, support - on which AWS was better for our workload. Our DC capex+opex was less than a quarter of the parent company’s opex spend on AWS, despite our workload being much greater - and we needed fewer staff to manage it. So I for one am really happy to see Oxide producing an on premise private cloud solution like this.

dcre 3y ago

It is simply false that everything has gone cloud. The whole argument falls down on the first premise. Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them.

elishah 3y ago
> Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them. This strikes me as at least as much of a leap as "everything has gone cloud." Containers are... kind of a thing. And while there certainly are use cases for VMs over containers, they're comparatively niche. This product seems as if it'd be a better fit for every real use case I've ever seen if it were a prebuilt kubernetes cluster rather than a prebuilt VM hypervisor.
- closeparen 3y ago
  That’s a Silicon Valley bubble perspective. Everything from your kid’s school to your car dealer to your automaker is VMWare.
  - lkjdsklf 3y ago
    > Everything from your kid’s school to your car dealer to your automaker is VMWare. While true, they also aren't buying $500k+ rack. They're running vmware on a much smaller scale.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    This is true, but I wouldn't underestimate the penetration of Cloud and Container First deployments. A number of customers I've worked with in Biotech, Telecom, Retail, Defense, and Financial sectors have either completed their cloud transformation or have ongoing 3-5 year timelines to make such a move. On the mid-market side, I've been seeing organizations increasingly offload the entire IT operation to MSPs instead of managing their own ESXi server. The MSP might often be using VMWare, but a number are also transitioning away from that. I think it's premature to say container and cloud first deployments are the norm, but the change and transition is rapidly occurring.
    - closeparen 3y ago
      I would expect most of those cloud deployments to be VMs not containers.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        It's 60-40 VMs-Containers in my experience. A lot of this is highly dependent on the kind of app you are migrating as well as the scale needs.
dataangel 3y ago
In 15 years of professional experience I've never worked at a place that uses VMs on the servers they own. They're just going to run Linux off an image so what's the point? You might want to look outside your niche.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 3y ago
  Is this true? I have honestly never worked in any company >50 people that didn't use VMs on owned hardware in some capacity, though usually not the main product. IT departments typically love VMs (and vmware)- AD machines are most often hosted on VMs on VMWare.
  - dataangel 3y ago
    Two of the companies I've worked for have run gigantic clusters and had >100 employees and didn't really use VMs. One of them used one to build some third party libs, but it was basically an implementation detail of one script. Everything on the servers was still bare metal. You already have user separations, permissions/privileges, etc. It's not clear what a VM adds other than as a hack to allowed installed packages to diverge which doesn't matter if you vendor them.
- TillE 3y ago
  Unless you're running at 100% load most of the time, it's atypical to run a server on bare metal these days. Much more flexible, maintainable, and cost-saving to stick servers in a VM. We sell a product that used to be delivered as a rack mountable server, but now I think nearly all our customers want a VM instead.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    I worked for a SaaS that ran a hybrid infra, partially on metal. Each rack had N blade enclosures, which together made up a logical isolated unit, with each blade running something. New blades would get provisioned automatically, then Terraform and Puppet handled their configuration. I don’t remember utilization exactly, but I think most of the blades were reasonably committed. That said, when I left they were moving from a hybrid model to entire cloud, so apparently the cost:flexibility ratio wasn’t to peoples’ liking.
faitswulff 3y ago
~Bandcamp~ Basecamp is doing just the opposite and leaving the cloud, in fact: https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...
- packetslave 3y ago
  Basecamp (DHH) not Bandcamp (Derek Sivers)
  - faitswulff 3y ago
    Thanks!
  - dewey 3y ago
    Isn’t Derek Sivers CD Baby?
    - faitswulff 3y ago
      This thread is just a litany of errors
    - packetslave 3y ago
      well heck. yes, sivers@ founded CD Baby, not Bandcamp.

qingcharles 3y ago

Many companies are leaving cloud hosting due to spiraling costs. Even well-knowns like 37signals: https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb It's nice to have options. Cloud good. Self-hosting good. Middle options good.

rzzzt 3y ago
My mind also jumped to this post. But can you name another company that did so recently?
- dijit 3y ago
  most companies will not be so loud about it. Double that for companies that were loud about their cloud usage, usually that came with some usage discounts on the side- on-prem does not, and it also looks bad to pivot anyway; so why be loud?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Why does it look bad? It is perfectly reasonable that at the time of the switch to the cloud, that it made good business sense. It is also perfectly reasonable that after some time that the landscapes have changed, and it is now good business sense to leave the cloud. If at the time of the switch to the cloud the pricing was cheap, then sure, but we all know that prices are not written in stone and will pretty much always increase. At some point, those increases become untenable. It's the nature of tech. We used to use thin clients connected to a server, then went to dedicated workstations, and currently we're back to connections to servers.

electroly 3y ago

Addressing #2 and #3, a "hybrid cloud" architecture can include a site-to-site VPN or direct fiber connection to a cloud. In AWS, Direct Connect data transfer pricing effectively makes your on-prem DC or colocation facility into an availability zone in your AWS Region. Direct Connect is $0.02/GB egress (out of AWS) and free ingress (into AWS), which is a better deal than cross-AZ data transfer within the AWS Region. Cross-AZ within an AWS Region is effectively $0.02/GB in both directions. This way, you can run your big static workloads on-prem to save money, and run your fiddly dynamic workloads in AWS and continue to use S3. That said, if a hybrid cloud architecture is your plan and you desire a managed rack-at-a-time experience, AWS Outposts would seem to be the safer pick. They've been shipping for years and they have public pricing that you can look at. I'm not sure that Oxide specifically has an opening for customers who want to keep their cloud. I wish them luck. https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/

nighmi 3y ago

> they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) This is an amazing plus in my eyes. Solaris systems are amazing.

sergiotapia 3y ago

Cloud was a low interest rate phenomena. I predict a return to metal servers and managed data centers.

oldtownroad 3y ago

Part of the appeal of the cloud over on-premise is that on-premise is not just expensive, but hard: oxide’s product isn’t just on-premise hardware, it’s on-premise hardware _that is easy_*. If on-premise was just expensive, it would be so much more appealing — because the cloud is expensive too! Most every software engineer has worked in an org where spending six figures per month on AWS or GCP is totally normal and acceptable because the alternative, buying hardware, is this awful scary unknown that could be cheaper but could also blow the entire company up. If oxide can solve that, suddenly on-premise becomes much more attractive. Yes, people are hooked on the cloud, but not because of data transfer… because it’s easy. * well, the first few deployments might not be easy but that’s true of anything new.

thinkmassive 3y ago
100% agree with you Also, what this person said :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552245
alephnerd 3y ago
Not OP, but what differentiates Oxide from VMWare or Dell? I can get pretty competitive quotes from both if I wanted to build my own DC, or if had much more niche HPC requirements I could go with NVIDIA.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  top-to-bottom integration and fully open-source, basically. That's a pretty good value proposition, though it does depend on how much premium you pay for it.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  I hate to link this comment agin in this thread, but I wrote a comment about almost exactly this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
- rapsey 3y ago
  The enterprises running VMWare I know run completely shit hardware and getting outrageously fleeced on any updates they want to do.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bcantrill 3y ago

I'm not sure what "weird EE side quests" you're referring to, but anyone interested in learning what we've done in terms of hardware should listen to the team in its own voice, e.g. in their description of our board bringup.[0] [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-the-bringup-lab-2021-12-06 https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...

tw04 3y ago

>* You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud. This is very much not true and seems to be a result of people in the valley thinking the rest of the world operates like the valley. In the rest of the world I've found mature businesses that bought into the "cloud is the best" quickly started doing the math on their billing rate and realized there is a VERY small subset of their business that has any reason to be in the cloud. Actually one of the very best use-cases of public cloud I've seen is a finance firm that sticks new products into the cloud until they hit maturity so they can properly right-size the on-prem permanent home for them. And if those products never take off, they just move on to the next one. They're willing to pay a premium for 12-18 months because they can justify it financially. >* Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch. And yet company's do it all the time. I think you'll again find mature fortune 500s can do the math on the exit cost vs. staying cost and quickly justify leaving in a reasonable time window. >* AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch. And as you've seen plenty of people here point out: most of those services tend to be overrated. OK, so you've got database as a service: except now you can't actually tune it to your specific workload. And $/query, even ignoring performance, is astronomically higher than building your own and paying a DBA to manage it unless you're a 2-man startup. >* Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here. I don't know of a single enterprise that has run anything BUT VMs for the last decade. Other than Mainframe (which you can argue is actually just VMs in a different name), and some HFT-type applications that need the lowest possible latency at all costs, it's all virtualized. As for Illumos: why do you care? Oxide is supporting and maintaining it as an appliance. Tape has been "dead" for 2 decades. FreeBSD has been "dead" since the early 2000s. It's only dead for people that don't deal with enterprise IT. >* Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups. I have no doubt they've done their research, and I can tell you from my industry experience there is a large cross-section of people who want an easy button. There's a reason why companys like Nutanix exist and have the market cap they do - but they could never actually get the whole way there because they got wrapped up in the "everything is software defined!!!". Which works really well until you realize that you're left to your own devices on networking. >So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now. I mean no disrespect but I get the impression you haven't ever worked with a fortune 500 that's outside of the valley. This is EXACTLY what they all want. They aren't going to run their entire datacenter on this, but when the datacenter is measured in hundreds to thousands of servers, they've got plenty of workloads that it's a perfect fit for

cjalmeida 3y ago

A lot of corprotation have a very hard time moving workloads to the cloud due to regulations alone. In some places it's a compliance nightmare, a landing page with "trust me, we're secure" from AWS is far from enough for legal counselors, auditors and the CISO.

ec109685 3y ago
Those corporations are dumb. Way more resources are spent making AWS secure than could ever be spent on bespoke security implementations.

rcxdude 3y ago

This is for people who want a turnkey cloud that they own, not rent. Renting is really expensive: you could probably buy a few of these racks a year for the cost of renting the same amount of compute on AWS. You also get a software stack which gives you the tools to manage the hardware without growing your own, with an extremely high level of trust. It's extremely well aimed at the companies which can afford the racks, because operating at that scale you are being fleeced by the hyperscalers.

doctor_eval 3y ago

My own experience here was with a rack of servers in a DC running a fairly heavy workload for a number of customers. Long story short, despite pressure to move from our parent company, there was literally no dimension - services, finance, performance, support - on which AWS was better for our workload. Our DC capex+opex was less than a quarter of the parent company’s opex spend on AWS, despite our workload being much greater - and we needed fewer staff to manage it. So I for one am really happy to see Oxide producing an on premise private cloud solution like this.