Just to be clear, though this did seem to get cleared up below, the level of abstraction you're working with on an Oxide rack is VMs, not k8s. If you wanted to run your own k8s on top, you could.

> because they’re not able to set it up themselves sounds insane to me

It is not about ability. It's about quality, and what you want to spend time on vs what you want to spend money on. (and of course time is money...)

There's a lot that goes into building and maintaining a private cloud. Some would prefer to build it themselves, some would prefer to focus on their core business and buy something that works well out of the box.

> What’s the plan when it breaks? Send the server back?

Building a robust product is very important to us, but so is supporting it. If something breaks, you contact support, and it gets sorted.

An advantage here is because we have created almost everything ourselves, under the same roof, we have fantastic insight into how the system works. No pointing the blame at some other vendor's firmware!

If that illusion breaks and you need to get into the weeds in the same way you do with self-hosted k8s, then the value proposition of their product goes poof. I'm just speculating, of course.

    > buying an out of the box k8s because they’re not able to set it up themselves

Enterprise CIO doesn’t want a hobby project (attempting to cobble together internal cloud orchestration and infra), they want to be able to show immediate business value. You charge what the market will bear. I’ve seen many companies with thousands of employees and spending millions, even tens of millions a month, on public cloud providers and just flail, unable to get to steady state post transformation (even after years of trying). This is made for those folks, especially with Broadcom having VMware self inflict harm on itself with recent strategy decisions.

“Write check. Cloud up.”

(no affiliation)

For example "3.2TB Enterprise NVMe Mixed Use AG Drive U.2 Gen4 with carrier" is $3,301.65 each, and you'd need 10 of those to match the Oxide storage spec -- already above the $30k total price you quoted. Similarly, "128GB LRDIMM, 3200MT/s, Quad Rank" was $3,384.79 each, and you'd need 8 of those to reach the 1TiB of memory per server Oxide provides.

With just the RAM and SSD cost quoted by Dell, I get to $60k per server (x16 = $960k), which isn't counting CPU, power, or networking.

I agree these costs are way way way higher than what I'd expect for consumer RAM or SSD, but I think if Oxide is charging in line with Dell they should be asking at least $1MM for that hardware. (At least compared to Dell's list prices -- I don't purchase enterprise hardware either so I don't know how much discounting is typical)

Edit: the specific Dell server model I was working off of for configuration was called "PowerEdge R6515 Rack Server", since it was one of the few I found that allowed selecting the exact same AMD EPYC CPU model that Oxide uses [1]

[1]: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-poweredge-servers/power...

dell famously doesn't have one price either.