161–170 of 203 posts
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> I don’t know who needs to hear this but raising a ton of money is not success. You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors. Oxide raising this much money is a big accomplishment.
> You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors. I’m pretty sure the dotcom bubble had many counterexamples
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The point was it being compared to Apple. Why not the vertical integration of Oracle Solaris servers, IBM vertical integration of IBM i, z/OS or z/TPF, Unisys vertical integration of Clearpath MCP or OS 2200?
IBM stuff is likely to expensive and optimized for different things. Same for the other Post-Mainframe stuff. You would pay for a lot of stuff you don't need, and there is a reason very few new costumers adopt it. Oxide costumers want to run standard VM that they normally run in public cloud. Do Oracle Solaris serves come with a horizontal scale out cloud infrastructure? As far as I know they don't.
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I think the idea is that, in fact, you do. Not one-time cost, but rather TCO.
You get a fully auditable hardware and software BOM, and you get an air-gapped, API-driven, on-prem cloud. You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
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You are 100% correct but you’d be shocked at the mortal terror that “self hosting” inflicts in the minds of even people who should really know better. Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs. The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff…
It is worth the exercise to honestly assess the maintenance, initial costs, ongoing costs, etc etc for owning your own. I did this at a company for a single server to let the ml group test fine tuning frameworks/throw crazy ideas at before spending real money on a training run and it paid for itself in like 3 months. Sometimes the math is overwhelmingly positive, sometimes it isn't. In general, the smaller/earlier yo…
Seems like people missed the end of what I wrote though. We run some bare metal but do not physically handle it. There’s many companies who will rent huge boxes with good connectivity in a data center. DataPacket is the best we have found for price and reliability.
Physically racking only makes sense if you are huge or have special requirements.
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Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it
Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a…
Also like I said: physically racking only makes sense if you are huge. Managed bare metal is a whole market category and it’s spectacularly cheaper than big cloud for most work loads. For bandwidth it’s like 1000X cheaper. That is not an exaggeration.
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They mean is that they are much harder to acquire. Their goal is to become an independent public company.
> "independent public company" But they are not independent though, they will be owned by Wall Street should they go public. Instead they remain in the private markets for a long time and sell secondary shares, just like what Stripe is doing. I hope they never go public for the reason that Wall Street would own them.
That depends on how much equity they issue as public stock. (And stock classes and voting rights, but you get the idea.)
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I probably wouldn't start with buying a big server if I was just starting out. I would consider renting one from Hetzner, OVH, or many others. There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidt…
Then buy a small server first. You don’t need a “big” server when you’re just starting out.
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I've dealt with both. I am continually amazed that people not only pay for AWS, but that it is so complicated, and that they use it in all sorts of absurd ways, not even just hosting 'vms' but using all sorts of amazon tools to do trivial tasks. I am sorry I just dont get it. Is it like learning salesforce and once you're sucked in you're just in? I am so glad I do not work at an AWS shop anymore and am very glad to…
You get AWS certifications, use as many AWS services as possible to pad your CV with the service experience and certifications, get your arguments and "well architected" dogma from AWS sales. Then you can get paid more at the next company (or at least high salary offers to extract a raise). Also building high complexity systems that require a big expensive cloud engineer staff gets you status and visibility. In a tig…
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> You don't raise this much money this fast without having some success to show the investors. I’m pretty sure the dotcom bubble had many counterexamples
If you follow Oxide (perhaps just by reading their Blog[1] and RFDs[2]), I think you'd find a more rigorous engineering and business culture than most case studies you're referring to from the 90s/00s. Of course it's not impossible that Oxide is getting themselves in trouble, but there is more evidence supporting a successful case, in my opinion. [1]: https://oxide.computer/blog [2]: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer…