Glad to see oxide on HN. Sick stack.
Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#12Is it weird that I'm insanely excited about Oxide as a product, even though I have absolutely no need or use case for it?
Not at all; they're building a cool tech stack, but the only thing they sell is super expensive hardware that no individual - and not even that many businesses! - is likely to be able to afford.
So, the only thing really inherent about our price point is that we're selling compute by the rack: as it turns out, a whole rack of server-class CPUs (and its accompanying DRAM, flash, NICs, and switching ASICs) is pretty expensive! But this doesn't mean that it's a luxury good: especially because customers won't need to buy software separately (as one does now for hypervisor, control plane, storage software, etc.), the Oxide rack will be very much cost competitive with extant enterprise solutions.
Cost competitive as it may be, it doesn't mean that it hits the price point for a home lab, sadly. One of the (many) advantages of an open source stack is allowing people to do these kinds of experiments on their own; looking forward to getting our schematics out there too!
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#13Is it weird that I'm insanely excited about Oxide as a product, even though I have absolutely no need or use case for it?
Nope, it's proof that their marketing team is doing a great job.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#14Is it weird that I'm insanely excited about Oxide as a product, even though I have absolutely no need or use case for it?
They're a tech company that makes actual technology. You're allowed to be excited. Better technology upstream has a habit of floating down the stack in some form or another, even when lawyers make it hard (ZFS was released under a GPL-incompatible license (some people will argue intentionally), yet has influenced over twenty years of filesystem design in the Linux ecosystem for things like btrfs, coincidentally also owned from an IP standpoint largely by Oracle, for example).
Who knows? In twenty years, we could see something cool come out of this, like better U-Boot tooling. Or maybe they'll be purchased by Oracle, which would if nothing else be funny this time.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#15I am very excited about what Oxide is doing, including how the work is being open sourced, and upstreamed.
I also love that they continued to bet on Illumos and am looking forward to the continued growth and development in the Illumos space.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#16I get that Oxide has a lot of ex-Joyent folks, but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. In many ways this feels like SmartOS all over again - a killer concept that will be eclipsed by a technically inferior but more tractable (for contributors, for management) solution.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#17I get that Oxide has a lot of ex-Joyent folks, but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. In many ways this feels like SmartOS all over again - a killer concept that will be eclipsed by a technically inferior but more tractable (for contributors, for management) solution.
As someone who got massively excited by SmartOS, only to see adoption never reach even the minimal levels I hoped for - yes, I hear you.
What would the hosting story look like now if 8(?) years ago 25% of servers had adopted SmartOS?
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#18I get that Oxide has a lot of ex-Joyent folks, but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. In many ways this feels like SmartOS all over again - a killer concept that will be eclipsed by a technically inferior but more tractable (for contributors, for management) solution.
I thought this too, but if the goal of the control plane software and blade host OS is solely to create VMs and not to actually be a general-purpose OS, this probably doesn't matter as much?
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#19I get that Oxide has a lot of ex-Joyent folks, but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. In many ways this feels like SmartOS all over again - a killer concept that will be eclipsed by a technically inferior but more tractable (for contributors, for management) solution.
If the Oxide stack is good someone could make a name for themselves by porting it to Linux to get wider hardware support.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#20No post body was provided.