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Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

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Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#31
post #24

Oxide is hiring in the following areas: electrical engineering, security, embedded, control plane + API, internal systems automation, dev tools, and product design. (I work there.) https://oxide.computer/careers

Curious... if I'm still in the "triage" bucket after 6 weeks should I assume the ship has sailed? I was really hoping to hear back one way or the other!

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.),…

It also turns out that not many people have 3-phase power and can support a heat/power load of 15kW in their homes ;)

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#33
post #16

I 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.

They still have to write a bunch of drivers that they'd get for free with Linux. Clearly they think the tradeoff is worth it but it's not obvious why.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#34
post #19
post #16

I 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.

It might make even more sense to run a cutting-edge distributed OS on the actual Oxide hardware. With rack-scale platforms like this it could be feasible to do SSI with distributed memory across multiple "nodes". Current "cloud" platforms like Kubernetes are already planning on including support for automated checkpointing and migration, which is sort of the first step prior to going fully SSI.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ha, entirely fair! When we raised our initial round, we said that our podcasting microphones were the marketing department, which proved prophetic.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why? If anything, commodity/non-custom hardware is what's hurting right now. Fat margins on hardware imply a kind of inherent flexibility that can be used to weather even extreme shocks.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#37
post #31
post #24

Oxide is hiring in the following areas: electrical engineering, security, embedded, control plane + API, internal systems automation, dev tools, and product design. (I work there.) https://oxide.computer/careers

Curious... if I'm still in the "triage" bucket after 6 weeks should I assume the ship has sailed? I was really hoping to hear back one way or the other!

No, you will hear back. We're trying really hard to keep to the 6 weeks thing but sometimes we don't succeed.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#38
post #14
post #6

Is 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…

> Or maybe they'll be purchased by Oracle, which would if nothing else be funny this time.

Oracle will likely be very interested in Oxide, but I suspect Bryan Cantrill would do everything in his power to prevent that happening. He's seen the lawn mower in action before and knows not to anthropomorphize it :)

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#39
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... >sigh The 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 contai…

KVM and containerization are not just "thin management veneers", they enable all sorts of new features.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... >sigh The 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 contai…

KVM and containerization are not just "thin management veneers", they enable all sorts of new features.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. KVM and containers are the technology. The "new" stuff I'm talking about are thin management veneers over these features.
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