[pkz]

This was a great blog post highlighting some of the weird business models that plague cloud computing. I tried to find competitors to suppliers like Oxide in the EU where there should be a huge amount of business cases for "datacenter in a box". Surprisingly there are very few options available (yes, Azure Stack is available but there is still licensing per cpu for that).

Why aren't there more players in this area?

[bcantrill]

We have definitely had the same question! I think the answer is twofold: it's technically hard -- and it's cross-domain in that you need both hardware AND software to pull it off. On the one hand, it's not like such expertise doesn't exist (and we are not doing our own silicon here!), but on the other, even with the right team, it is time-consuming (and therefore expensive).

If the difficulty and cost were the only challenge, this would be a candidate to do at a larger company, but the cross-domain nature of it makes it really thorny: you would need a lot of internal alignment to succeed -- and (more challenging) you need to maintain that internal alignment for a protracted period of time. I had done something not wholly dissimilar (though frankly much less ambitious) at Sun back in the day[0] -- and even though Sun was much more amenable to this kind of disruptive endeavor than any company of its size[1], we barely pulled it off. Indeed, some of the worst behavior I ever saw at Sun was from the people who trying to prevent us from succeeding because they felt it threatened them. I simply cannot imagine doing something more ambitious at Sun -- or as ambitious anywhere else.

We came to the conclusion that it really has to be new company formation -- which means raising money to do it, which means finding the right investors. Even though the upside is extraordinary, finding the right investors in hard tech is really, really tough[2]. So yes, there should be more options -- but there aren't, and there are frankly unlikely to be in the foreseeable future...

[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can...

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2011/07/12/in-defense-of-intrap...

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/deep-tech-i...

[wmf]

VxRack, Nutanix, Outposts, Azure Stack as you said, probably something from Oracle Cloud...