[jbnorth]

Disclaimer: I work for AWS

I think Outpost is a great hybrid-ish solution for those companies with workloads in AWS that want to supplement that with on-premise workloads using the same APIs and tools they are already used to.

The use cases I see for Oxide are, like other have said, are for hyperscalers or hosting providers who want to have their own on-premise infrastructure that isn’t tied to another entity like AWS. Whether that’s because you have the in-house talent to manage it or for compliance reasons it’s required it does have a niche.

[ec109685]

Currently, Outpost doesn’t provide any discounts over hosting the same workloads in the cloud, so it seems only useful if you can’t host in the public cloud. For now, they could easily be undercut and a solution like oxide has advantages.

But if outpost was nearly the same price as oxide, wouldn’t you always want access to the full AWS or GCP infrastructure and world class control plane versus something bespoke that only works in your own data center.

I think what Oxide has to bank on is that this isn’t a market that Google, Microsoft or AWS want to really compete in (e.g. it may require these companies to undercut themselves too much).

[swyx]

ok so.. what exactly counts as a hyperscaler? and how many of them are there?

[mlindner]

People who design their data centers in at least rack-sized units and ideally data center sized units, and creates custom hardware fit for that purpose. Would be my personal definition.

Wikipedia has a short page with a different definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperscale_computing

[panick21_]

Hyperscalers, not that many. But there are lots of other hosting providers and company who run their own infrastructure.