I still don't get Oxide's offering. Anyone care to give me the skinny?

I wrote this back in 2022 when I worked there, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324

Server racks which are vertically integrated and provide great cooling, are quiet, and fully vertically integrated software (including bootloaders, hypervisor, etc. -- no BIOS!).

This includes everything from the rack itself to the PDU/switch/BMC, to the actual server blade and its chassis.

All presented in a nice package to give you a on-prem cloud-like experience.

And this is hosted in an Oxide datacenter or shipped to the customer?

shipped to the customer

you buy one or more of the data-centre-rack-sized computers, hook em up to each other / your datacentre network, and you now have essentially a cloud services platform like AWS/Azure, in your own datacentre, under your control, with full visibility of what every part of the platform is doing (hypervisor, underlying bare metal kernel, firmware, bootloader, etc), because it's ALL open source, written from the ground up by them

I think it's pretty neat!

Shipped - hence on-premises.

Shipped to the customer, we don't offer leased/managed hardware or VM instances.

I think this blog covers it pretty well:

https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer

Basically they sell a pre-assembled rack of compute, storage and networking with their own open source management software to build on-premise clouds.

They are selling you a rack of computers instead of a single computer, with well integrated high speed connection, storage, power, and cooling.

Looks like a mainframe computer and their selling point is that the operating system is open source.

I have no idea why you'd buy that over any of the more established players that have a proven track record of being able to support these multi-million dollar machines for many years.

I'd argue there's not that great of a track record, legacy vendors are being legally forced to provide better support for their closed-source systems in the EU because it generally isn't very good. Also you're usually buying hardware and software that weren't designed together which comes with many sharp edges we're solving for.

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