As an engineer, an Oxide system works like any other cloud provider. You’re just interacting with its API and tooling like you would with Google Cloud or AWS.
To someone on the IT/Operations side, obviously there are differences but theres SIGNIFICANTLY less labor required to build-out and operate an Oxide system vs a rack full of servers. The biggest difference for these people is that there’s actual hardware vs a Cloud Provider, but also costs are fixed so there’s likely no monthly or quarterly meetings with finance arguing over the cloud bill, tying people up to try and shave a few thousand off the bill every month.
In finance/accounting, Oxide is probably the most different: now compute is CapEx rather than OpEx. Depending on your company’s stage that can be a wonderful thing for the bean counters.