Nobody is saying anything about anything unethical... I am mocking the idea of needing the steel box, forget about the steel box.
It's just Amazon Reserved Instances, but with an indefinite period. Okay? Isn't that an attractive product?
Why am I talking about banks? Because maybe in Oxide's deck it says, "Amazon will NEVER do this. Amazon will NEVER sell indefinite reserved instances." Fine. Well a bank can simply pay spot prices and sell you an up front price, if you want. Okay? It's the same thing. It only matters what Amazon does when we're talking about $100m Series B, which is what this article is about! It's not about the technology.
> On-premises computing was so good that the cloud providers packaged it up and sold it back to people at a premium that could only ever be rented.
No... guys... AWS makes sense. It's not a premium "that could only ever be rented." There are a ton of much cheaper cloud providers. Amazon just happens to be selling the Rolls Royce of clouds. They have a ridiculous margin. Figma makes more profit for AWS each year than it will ever make for itself in its entire lifetime. "that could only ever be rented" is simply not true, they can afford to make all sorts of innovative pricing models, reserved instances being one of them.
Oxide just hasn't had to compete with "99 Year AWS Reserved Instances." But absolutely, positively, utterly nothing stops them from offering that. They already give you a massive, MASSIVE discount for 3 year reservations.
That said, obviously not having to deal with human beings managing hardware is valuable. It's the same shit as the difference between "AI" meaning a computer and overseas workforces. They might produce the same outputs for the same cost, but think deeply about yourself: how much are you willing to pay to deal with a computer instead of an IT tech? To avoid phone calls? To avoid doing things that might be faster, but are in person?
