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.

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).

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

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

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

AWS Outposts are tragically limiting in so many ways. If you are a small shop they are great but if you don’t fit their model exactly you are SOL.

Same problem with Anthos.

You can work around the limitations by having a million points of presence with them and splitting up your workloads but there’s real costs associated with that model. Running 1 rack in 100 DCs is a lot harder than 10 racks in 10 DCs.

Fwiw I work with an engineer that came from a shop that used them. Long story short: they’re not remotely cost effective, are quite limited, and existing AWS tool chains run into all sorts of hair-pulling snags.

My gut is that they are for places that need on-Prem for compliance purposes for certain parts of their stack

Agree that today they aren’t competitive.

But that seems entirely due to AWS not currently being interested in this market versus something fundamentally limiting about their tech.