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@steveklabnik: Just out of curiosity, did it not work out at Cloudflare? Seems like a rather short stint.
What software products have you written from scratch?
Or are you mostly talking and keeping your name in the press.
Can someone provide on ELI5 for what this company does and how it's different? I get that its goal is to allow folks to buy instead of rent their hardware, but how is it different from the old days of buying servers? Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? Or am I just totally missing this?
Big cloud and infra companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook) have the resources to build computers, customized for the work in the cloud on the cheap. As a company that is not one of them, you can either buy their cloud offering (paying hefty premium) or choose to build your infra yourself, using run-of-the-mill Dell servers or the like, but then all these customizations will not be available to you or will not be available for the reasonable price.
Oxide is the company that wants to offer servers customized for cloud work to everyone. Whether they will actually ship it to you for you to install in your DC or they will have their own DC - remains to be seen.
I'm not interested in the incessant self promotion of a single individual. What software products have you written from scratch? Or are you mostly talking and keeping your name in the press.
I'm not interested in the incessant self promotion of a single individual. What software products have you written from scratch? Or are you mostly talking and keeping your name in the press.
Why is "from scratch" the determinant of a good engineer? That's a tiny portion of the work, and only a single component of an individual's contribution.
I personally only use CPUs that I have hand made from the organic metals mined in my backyard.
Can someone provide on ELI5 for what this company does and how it's different? I get that its goal is to allow folks to buy instead of rent their hardware, but how is it different from the old days of buying servers? Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? Or am I just totally missing this?
> what Oxide is doing is building computers that are suitable for hyperscalers, but selling them, rather than building another public cloud. These computers will have hardware and software designed together to create excellent systems.
Their website:
> We are building a new kind of server. True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.
A puff piece [1]:
> Oxide's mission is to create a server using standard x86 processors from companies like Intel or AMD that strips away a lot of the extraneous software that ships with a mainstream server, giving customers a "clean sheet" designed for their operating system, infrastructure, and application requirements. [...] computers for which the software and hardware were designed in concert tend to deliver better performance and reliability than all-purpose off-the-rack servers [...] Those retail servers are still designed as one-size-fits-all boxes that must accommodate all of the ways a potential customer might use those servers, which means they ship with a lot of extraneous firmware. "What we're cleaning up throughout the bottom of the stack just makes it all run better and [makes it] more debuggable," said Frazelle, the startup's chief product officer.
I think i understand what they are offering - hardware that is better for building private clouds on - but not how they plan to deliver it. After all, they aren't making their own CPUs, drives, or RAM, are they? They get to design the motherboard, firmware, and enclosure - anything else? They must think there's enough juice there to be able to outweigh the brand value and economies of scale that Dell, HPE, etc have.
Can someone provide on ELI5 for what this company does and how it's different? I get that its goal is to allow folks to buy instead of rent their hardware, but how is it different from the old days of buying servers? Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? Or am I just totally missing this?
So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc > Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers. I will ha…
I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan:
https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?t=1299
The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control - eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I can't tell if this is a particular bee in the founders' bonnets, or a real market demand, or if they know about some scary threat they can't talk about.
Whilst this is definitely cool, and something that will get a lot of people on HN super pumped, it doesn't sound like something any company i have worked at would really care about. Unless these machines also deliver significantly better performance. But then, those companies were not hyperscalers.
Can someone provide on ELI5 for what this company does and how it's different? I get that its goal is to allow folks to buy instead of rent their hardware, but how is it different from the old days of buying servers? Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? Or am I just totally missing this?
Here us how I understood this and Steve's post was actually more helpful in this than previous announcements. Big cloud and infra companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook) have the resources to build computers, customized for the work in the cloud on the cheap. As a company that is not one of them, you can either buy their cloud offering (paying hefty premium) or choose to build your infra yourself, using run-o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc > Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers. I will ha…
It seems that video has been posted to HN twice, but didn't attract any comments either time, sadly. I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan: https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?t=1299 The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control - eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I…