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Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#22Love what they are doing. And as a cloud and on-prem supporter I get what they are trying to accomplish.
If you haven't heard you should check out their podcast, "On the Metal [0]" It's a truly a gift especially if you are an elder millenial.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#23I 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?
I got massively excited by SmartOS, too. Coming from a vSphere and Hyper-V world I found it to be a joy to use. The way that Illumos zones leverage ZFS is really, really cool. The tooling in SmartOS was very nice to use, too.
I never used it in production anywhere, admittedly. I also never got a chance to try out Triton. I'm on the fence about whether or not I keep my SmartOS hosts in my home network now that Illumos is a second-class citizen when it comes to OpenZFS.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#24Oxide is hiring in the following areas: electrical engineering, security, embedded, control plane + API, internal systems automation, dev tools, and product design. (I work there.)
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#25Is 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…
That is the really cool thing about them-- they're actually making new computers and the software and firmware to go with them.
Everything else "new" seems to be a rehash of the IBM PC (my "server" has an ISA-- ahem-- "LPC" bus... >sighThe same goes with software and firmware. Any "new" systems software the last 10 years seems to be thin management veneers over real technologies like the Linux kernel, KVM and containers, GNU userland, etc. And it all ends up running on the same cruddy BMC's, "lights-out" controllers, embedded RAID controllers, etc.
I get a little bit of excitement at ARM-based server platforms (and RISC-V, for that matter) but everything there seems to be at even less of an "enterprise" level (from a reliability, serviceability, and management perspective) than the PC-based servers I already loathe.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#26Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#27I 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.
> but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc.
Does it matter? Oxide is building the whole stack - their own hardware with their own firmware to run their own OS with their own virtualization layer. They don't need support for arbitrary devices, because they control the hardware.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#28I 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.
Depends how deeply integrated it is; if nothing else, I suspect that bhyve and kvm have sufficiently different APIs that it would be at least quite annoying to paper over the differences.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#29I 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.
> but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. Does it matter? Oxide is building the whole stack - their own hardware with their own firmware to run their own OS with their own virtualization layer. They don't need support for arbitrary devices, because they control the hardware.
I really worry about a startup taking a massive bet on their own custom hardware now in 2022. The world was much, much different in December 2019 when Oxide started than it is now. Let's hope the investment cash keeps flowing and the hardware gets to folks that purchased it.
Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope, it's proof that their marketing team is doing a great job.
Especially because there isn't one!
Well, on paper:) You, personally, are an amazing marketing department no matter what your official title is; "The Soul of a New Machine", for instance, is brilliant at getting mindshare. To be fair, I'm fairly sure you don't think of what you're doing as marketing, but the only difference I see is that this is much more natural/sincere than 99.99% of similar efforts - you're actually just that passionate and good at sharing your passion.