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Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

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Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#21

Post by spamizbad »

sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

Seems strange to me too but it sounds like the end-users basically never interact with this - it's just firmware humming along in the background. As long as its open-source and reasonably well documented its already lightyears ahead of what else is out there.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#22

Post by wmf »

steveklabnik wrote: post #14
sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

> does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? It's not like we specifically say "oh btw there's illumos inside and that's why you should buy the rack." It's not a customer-facing detail of the product. I'm sure most will never even know that this is the case. What customers do care about is that the rack is efficient, reliable, suits their needs, etc. Choosing illumos instead of Linux here is a c…

The Linux vs. Illumos decision seems to be downstream of a more fundamental decision to make VMs the narrow waist of the Oxide system. That's what I'm curious about.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#23

Post by greggyb »

sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

If you're running in one of the big 3 cloud providers, the bottom-level hypervisors are not-linux. This is equivalent. Are you anti-AWS or anti-Azure for the same reason?

This is the substrate upon which you will run any virtualized infrastructure.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#25

Post by littlestymaar »

steveklabnik wrote: post #19
littlestymaar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bcantrill used to work at Sun then became CTO at Joyent, so the reason why Joyent ran Illumos is probably the same reason as why Oxide is, because Cantrill likes it and judges that it's a good fit for what they are doing.

As I elaborated above, bcantrill did not decree that we must use illumos. Technical decisions are not handed down from above at Oxide.

I saw your comment[1] after I wrote mine, but I'm not saying that he's forcing you guys to use it (that would not a good way of being a CTO at a start-up…), but that doesn't prevent him from advocating for solutions he believes in.

Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180706

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#26

Post by StillBored »

sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

Linux is a nightmare in the embedded/appliance space because one ends up just having platform engineers who spend their day fixing problems with the latest kernels, drivers, core libraries, etc, that the actual application depends on.

Or one goes the route of 99% of the IoT/etc vendors, and never update the base OS and pray that there aren't any active exploits targeting it.

This is why a lot of medium-sized companies cried about Centos, which allowed them to largely stick to a fairly stable platform that was getting security updates without having to actually pay/run a full blown RHEL/etc install. Every ten years or so they had to revisit all the dependencies, but that is a far easier problem than dealing with a year or two update cycle, which is too short when the qualification timeframe for some of these systems is 6+ months long.

So, this is almost exclusively a Linux problem; any of the *BSD/etc. alternatives give you almost all of what Linux provides without this constant breakage.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#27

Post by qmarchi »

greggyb wrote: post #23
sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

If you're running in one of the big 3 cloud providers, the bottom-level hypervisors are not-linux. This is equivalent. Are you anti-AWS or anti-Azure for the same reason? This is the substrate upon which you will run any virtualized infrastructure.

Small note, that's not true for Google Cloud, which runs on top of Linux, though modified.

Disclaimer: Former Googler, Cloud Support

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#28

Post by wmf »

greggyb wrote: post #23
sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

If you're running in one of the big 3 cloud providers, the bottom-level hypervisors are not-linux. This is equivalent. Are you anti-AWS or anti-Azure for the same reason? This is the substrate upon which you will run any virtualized infrastructure.

I suspect a lot of people would (irrationally) freak out if they saw how the public cloud works because it's so different from "best practices". Oxide would probably trigger people less if they never mentioned Illumos but that's not really an option when it's open source.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#29

Post by refulgentis »

milon wrote: post #24

I'm glad this is out, i'm going to deploy this locally and learn as much about it as possible. Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there. Thank you Oxide team!

Can you get me excited? I spent 20 seconds browsing the homepage and walked away with "so the idea is vertical integration for on-premise server purchases? On custom OS? Why? Why would people pay a premium?"

But immediately got myself to "what does a server OS do anyway, doesn't it just launch VMs? You don't need Linux, just the ability to launch Linux VMs"

Tell me more? :)

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#30

Post by NexRebular »

sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

Not everything needs to be linux. Besides, if monocultures are supposed to be harmful, why is linux being thrown to everything nowadays? Very dangerous to have a single point of failure in (critical) applications.
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