Hey, it’s Bryan from Oxide back with another FAQ Friday. A question that we’ve gotten from time to time is:
Does AWS Outposts compete with Oxide?
This is a question, and actually, this may be the very first question we had about Oxide, because we had this question before we even had the name for the company.
It was re:Invent 2018, and Amazon announced Outposts. Steve and I knew we wanted to start a computer company together. We did not know the name of the company, and yet here we were watching re:Invent, and it seemed like AWS was managing to kill a company that wasn’t even named yet. I was pretty wide-eyed, and my longtime friend and colleague, Adam Leventhal, the only person that I had told about Oxide, cheerfully DMs me, "I think AWS may have just killed your company."
Like, they can’t kill our company. We don’t even have a name. I wanted to dig into Outposts quickly, and I wanted to understand first, is it bought or is it rented? Because if it’s purchased, that would be potentially competitive with Oxide. But my guess was, and my guess turned out to be right, it is rented.
And if it was rented, my guess was, which also turned out to be right, they didn’t want to incentivize you to run Outposts in your own data center. They want to incentivize you to run EC2 in their data centers. So not only is it rented, it’s more expensive than running EC2 in public cloud. But wait, it gets worse, because that Outpost is attached to an AWS region. When that region is updated, when the compute in that region is updated, your Outposts in your data center can get updated in the middle of the day and suddenly unavailable. Customers really don’t like that.
But wait, it gets even worse, because when that rack gets fully depreciated, it doesn’t belong to you. It’s rented. When it gets fully depreciated, it comes out of your data center. Not making that up. So you’re gonna have someone show up, yank it out of your data center, and boy, I hope you got another plan.
For folks that wanna run compute on-prem, these are terrible answers, because you wanna run on-prem because you want to control your fate. You want economics. It needs to be in your own facility. It does not make sense to run AWS Outposts. So I had the same question. It’s a very reasonable question. But no, AWS Outposts and the Oxide rack are really not comparable. This one you own and you run in your own DC as long as you want. Thanks, and see you next time.