I think providing reliable compute and storage is not so difficult and for that there are many options that are cheaper than AWS or Azure (e.g. Hetzner cloud, Scaleway, Vultr or DO). The hard part, in my opinion, is providing managed services like relational databases or key-value stores. For that there are far fewer vendors available, so if Oxide manages to build something that makes this easier I think they’d have a pretty solid business case. In general I think we see a trend towards simpler IT and system architectures, which I really like as I think the complexity has become way too high. I e.g. know a company that invested significant resources (people and hardware) in setting up an OpenStack cluster but even after three years never managed to use it in production. From what I’ve heard k8s has a similar complexity problem, so I really think there’s room for a simpler approach to scalable computing.