It's a rack-sale computer that uses hardware and software co-design to achieve things a stack of disparate 1U servers and network switches can't. You plug in power. You connect it to your network. You get a cloud provider like control plane API and web console to provision VMs, disks, and VPCs. That's it papa.

The host OS is an implementation detail since you, the customer, aren't running workloads directly on the host OS. The VMs running on Oxide run on our host OS, much like other cloud providers.

That rack-scale hardware and software co-design allows Oxide to provide higher CPU and memory density in the same footprint at lower power than competitors. That's super helpful for companies operating at scale where data center power matters. The co-design allows us tackle security problems by eliminating the BIOS, providing attestation from the firmware up to the guest VM, and actually updating the firmware that's on Oxide rather than letting it rot like most customers do today.

This is why when people ask which verticals Oxide targets we kinda say "all of them" because different customers benefit from different Oxide features, but all customers need the core VM, disk, VPC abstraction. Some customers come to us because they don't have an API to manage their on-premises compute and Oxide solves that. Others come to us because they need absolute confidence that there's no malicious firmware running in their compute stack. Others come to us because they are tired of paying exorbitant amounts of recurring money just to run on-premises compute.

Our job is to make Oxide an appealing on-premises computing platform for customers to run their public cloud provider workloads and on-premises workloads without it feeling like it's an entirely different platform than you're used to.