The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shipment
Somebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is cool but I don&#x27;t get the business model, it seems deeply impractical.<p>* You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there&#x27;s a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud.<p>* Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That&#x27;s how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch.<p>* AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you&#x27;ll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch.<p>* 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&#x27;re building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here.<p>* Based on blogs&#x2F;twitter&#x2F;mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they&#x27;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&#x2F;power setups.<p>So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn&#x27;t mind VMs, doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve done that&#x27;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.<p>I don&#x27;t get it, it just seems like a bunch of geeks playing with VC money?