[rob74]

Yes, but... what is a "Cloud Computer"? Is it a "computer in the cloud", like e.g. an AWS EC2 instance? Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack (on which you will probably want to run your own cloud, because everybody's doing that nowadays, hence the name), like in this case? And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables? And what do you do with this "cloud computer"? Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you? So there is some potential for confusion - nothing that can't be mostly cleared up by reading a bit further, but still...

[steveklabnik]

> Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack

In a sense. Yes, it is a rack of servers. You're buying a computer. But we've designed the rack of servers as a full rack of servers, rather than an individual 1U. Comes with software to manage the rack like you would a cloud; you don't think of an oxide rack as individual compute sleds, you think of it as a pool of capacity.

> And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables?

Because you are buying an entire rack. The sleds are blind mated. You plug in power, you plug in networking, you're good to go. You're not cabling up a bunch of individual servers when you're installing.

> Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you?

Customers get them delivered to their data center.

Happy to answer any other questions.

[FridgeSeal]

> like e.g. an AWS EC2 instance? Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack

I mean, the former is just the latter with some of the setup done for you no? Anyways, it’s a full server rack, with tightly vertically integrated hardware and software. Not sure if you’ve poked around the rest of their site, but it seems like their whole software stack is designed with some really nice usability and integration in mind: there’s a little half-snippet there suggesting that provisioning bare-metal VM’s out of the underlying hardware could as trivial as provisioning an EC2 with Terraform, and if that’s the case, that’s _massive_.

> And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables?

Because they’ve gone to great lengths and care to design it to not need anything extraneous IIUC. I think the compute sleds all automatically mount into some automatic backplane that presumably gives you power, cooling and networking, and then, as above, you presumably configure all that via software, as you would your AWS setup. Not an expert here though, happy to be corrected by anyone who actually knows better.

> Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you?

Presumably the latter, given they’re a hardware company, but if their software is even a 10th as good as it seems, I fully believe there’ll be a massive market for renting bare-metal capacity from them.

[steveklabnik]

> there’s a little half-snippet there suggesting that provisioning bare-metal VM’s out of the underlying hardware could as trivial as provisioning an EC2 with Terraform,

We have a terraform provider, yes https://github.com/oxidecomputer/terraform-provider-oxide

[NKosmatos]

That's what some of us are saying, it's not crystal clear what they sell.

You use words like: it seems, I think, presumably, I believe... This is what we're arguing. A company that has raised $44 million Series A for sure can afford to clearly write what they offer.

I understand, you can't have all the people happy and no matter what you do there will always be "weirdos" that don't like your page/design/wording, but hey at least recognize it :-)