"...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more in demand than ever."
I think that's a good summary description.
In other matters I was went looking for the Rust connection (given a name like Oxide) and was not disappointed.
Does that mean "I have servers... Oxide manages the virtualization"?
Or "I bought a rack full of Oxide and now I have my own puddle of elastic compute on-premises." (If you condense a small cloud, you get a puddle, I presume.)
If hardware is involved it would seem like the latter. In which case they'll be competing with Amazon's on-premises solution and commodity hardware.
I wonder if they're trying to eliminate the VM substrate layer that clouds today currently run on by replacing it with hardware and an OS that is more amenable to running containers natively with good isolation/security properties?
Nitro doubles down on VMs instead of abandoning them, but it is indeed a good example of what integrated hardware and software can do.
What they did with Nitro is develop custom PCIe devices to handle storage and networking, so these devices' virtual functions (SR-IOV) are directly passed through to the VMs and now the hypervisor basically has nothing to do other than switching contexts.
I'm afraid what people mean by that statement and what the startup is going to try to do are completely different things. As in people mean AWS-like cloud services running on multiple servers they control with all the fault tolerance and geographically distributed. But for the startup it probably means cloud services running on expensive servers in a fast local network.
"...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more in demand than ever."
I think that's a good summary description.
In other matters I was went looking for the Rust connection (given a name like Oxide) and was not disappointed.