Because until you're big enough to have local weather systems evolving inside your offices, that's called 'servers'. I'm not saying not to do it, it's great, and cost effective, and much safer, but calling a small-to-mid business's servers 'cloud' is like saying I have a 'private Uber' in my garage that I can drive myself.
Right or wrong, I think the notion of "the cloud" that Oxide is selling is the "elastic" part--the ability to request resources by quantity instead of having to think about the exact servers responsible for serving your request. So physical servers become an implementation detail rather than a developer concern. That's a concept that can apply to how you provision two on-site servers (or even one, really) as much as a whole multi-data-center cloud computing service.
I don't think Oxide is trying to say no one's done this before, more that they're the best and most comprehensive offering to buy an onsite setup for this fully set up from a third party.
That is correct, yeah. Like every company and product, we do think that we are doing something special, but we'd never claim that nobody has done something like this before. Heck, a lot of the choices that we're making have come out of personal experiences of the founders doing that sort of work previously, as well as hyperscalers talking publicly about the choices they've made internally. We build on the shoulders of giants, just like everyone else.
Because until you're big enough to have local weather systems evolving inside your offices, that's called 'servers'. I'm not saying not to do it, it's great, and cost effective, and much safer, but calling a small-to-mid business's servers 'cloud' is like saying I have a 'private Uber' in my garage that I can drive myself.