Good question. Can’t eliminate the BIOS/UEFI on commodity systems. Can’t remove/cut down the BMC. Can’t plumb the hardware root of trust into the OS and VMs. Can’t do dynamic rack-level power capping (future roadmap). There’s a whole bunch of the software stack that only works because the hardware and software were designed together.

Oxide exists in part because commodity systems don’t work for building a cloud at scale (Joyent). Similarly, AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t use commodity systems, they use hardware that was designed to work together with their software, Nitro being a prime example.

It's not actually secret — it's open source! We talk openly about our architecture.

Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s

Their machines are x86 but they've rearchitected basically everything else in the pursuit of a cohesive and integrated machine, they don't even have a BIOS. The secret sauce is having full control of the software stack, and as close to full control of the firmware as is possible on x86.

What can't be replicated is a culture of simplicity, quality, and security. I've seen this firsthand working at IBM.

(Former oxide)

Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.

I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but

> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint

That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.

EDIT: here’s another commentor with an example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176704

> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers?

It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)

> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.

There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.

> Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to.

Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.