Adam’s conclusion:
> I understand why customers want Outposts. Despite the grousing in this post, I’m an AWS fan and have tremendous respect for their rate of innovation. Customers want API-driven infrastructure, the flexibility and speed of development that it provides. Traditional on-premises vendors, most concisely represented by the EMC/Dell/VMware conglomerate, have failed to evolve their way into this experience which is why the hardware and software from the hyperscalers (including Outposts) looks quite different. Customers are faced with a literal dilemma: on one hand they can continue buying the moderately priced, expensive to operate, inefficient to use, legacy gear from Dell/HPE/etc or they can pay exorbitantly for something like AWS Outposts. The former is throwing good money after bad, investing in an ecosystem that has continued to underdeliver; the latter cedes more and more control to AWS and locks them into an unaffordable future.
is a big reason for why I cared about making GKE on-prem / bare metal a thing: I don’t believe (most) customers on-prem want to buy new hardware from a cloud provider. They mostly want to have consistent API-driven infrastructure with their hybrid cloud setup, and don’t want to burn their millions of dollars of equipment to the ground to do so.
I recognize that Oxide’s bet is that customers will prefer to stay on-premises if they can get cheaper / “better” hardware. That’s an interesting thesis! But many folks really want nothing to do with owning and managing infrastructure, they just feel forced to do so (and I agree with Adam here, it’s non trivially about the economics).
Edit to add: I commonly troll people with dell.com list prices, combined with colo provider cost of power, percentage spare, redundant networking. A pile of boxes != Cloud, but that is what companies want to compare to (the crossing point is not same cost, but it’s also not some huge integer multiple if your cost of infrastructure matters to you; for some businesses infrastructure costs do not matter, anymore than their power bill does).