FAQ Friday

No, not in a typical sense. When you create an instance, you specify the vCPU and memory, and there’s no instance types like there is in other cloud providers.

Cloud providers combine hardware generation, vCPUs and memory into what are called instance types. But Oxide doesn’t have instance types. You can choose your resources at a per vCPU or per one gigabyte memory granularity, and that allows you to perfectly size your instances for the workload. Don’t worry if you get it wrong—you can always resize your instances later.

Now, that doesn’t mean you get to use unlimited resources for your instances. You can’t create an instance that’s larger than the compute sled it’s running on, and there are limits within the control plane to prevent creating such an instance. If instance types are tied to a hardware generation and Oxide doesn’t have instance types, how do users select hardware?

Well, the answer is today you don’t. We only have one compute generation currently, but our next generation compute sled is coming. And when it does, we will introduce a mechanism that users can use to select the hardware generation for their instance.

And we’re still gonna keep it decoupled from vCPUs and memory to allow you to rightly size your instances on either hardware generation. Let’s talk about some of the practical benefits to Oxide’s approach to instance types. It allows you to make efficient use of your Oxide resources and perfectly size your instances for your workload.

You don’t need to step up to the next instance type just because you need one more vCPU or a little bit more RAM. You can rightly size your instances depending on your workload. You also get simplified capacity planning. You don’t need to map your actual usage to your instance type and vice versa. That lowers the risk to choosing the right resources upfront because you could always change it and resize it later.

If our approach to instance types sounds exciting to you, let us know. Contact us via our website so we can understand your use cases better, and explore some of the benefits of running your workloads on Oxide.