Some examples:
x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the default in the datacenter. It was hard for ARM to break in and it mostly happened when AWS did it by fiat. If ARM had made some loss-leader actually useful laptops and workstations available, it might have happened sooner.
But x86 largely didn’t deploy AVX-512 in client machines, so people who wrote libraries only used it for fun or benchmarking, so it wasn’t widely used, and most users flubbed it anyway. (And might have gotten it right if they had the hardware on their desk.)
People target Nvidia datacenter GPUs. But people have targeted them for a long time, because they have them in their gaming machines too.
Xilinx used to push free academic gear quite hard, because that was a big lead into people learning how to use their gear.
So, if I were giving Oxide straightforward sales advice, absolutely don’t get distracted with small systems. But maybe, if Oxide thought of it as lead generation, Oxide should do it anyway. If I could buy something small enough to be affordable but big enough to be useful [0], I might get one. And I’d target it with my own stuff, and fix bugs, and evangelize it at little cost to Oxide.
[0] For me, maybe 100-150TB of spinning rust (or cheap NVMe or the ability to attach a JBOD), plus anywhere from 4-64 cores, in a format that works on 120V and fits in, say, 16U or less, at a credible price point, would be quite likely to net Oxide a sale. (Just one sale but still!) It could be sold as a developer thing, and there would be absolutely no expectation that it would perform like the real thing. If I found it awesome, I might buy a couple more. But I would also use it and make things work on it and talk about it, and if a whole bunch of people did this, Oxide might get a bunch of real sales.
(Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)
> (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)
Right now, this early: no. Sleds have compute and storage located together, so the unit of customization is currently "number of sleds in the rack" which according to https://oxide.computer/product/specifications apparently is currently three, not two, at the moment: 16, 24 or 32 sleds.
You are right that these need to be different for certain customers and workloads, we just aren't ready to support those just yet. We'll get there. Same issue, different aspect.
A future of developers and CTOs who grew up with Oxide!
But Oxide is small and shouldn’t listen to me unless a customer asks for this.
I get that in theory… and it makes sense most of the time. I’m not sure it does this time though. You don’t exactly “target” Oxide as an OS or platform. Rather, you use it to run VMs on. Those VMs are whatever you want. Other than that, I’m not sure what else having a home-lab version of Oxide would look like.
A different competitor to Proxmox?
Yes, you can do slimmed down cloud deployments, but you're still not running the (actual) S3 or EC2 backends at home.
At most, you’re talking a K8s based deployment (for a workload that could scale up or down). But that’s also not at the level of working with Oxide directly. And I doubt Oxide wants to get into the business of selling access to their own public cloud.