Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 268 posts

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

#41

Post by apendleton »

stonogo wrote: post #20
jeffbee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have the same gut reaction to ESXi?

I sure do. We've finally got to a place where we don't need weird hardware tricks to containerize workloads -- this is why a lot of shops pursue docker-like ops for production. When I buy hardware, long-term maintenance is a factor, and when my whole operations fleet relies on ESX, or in this case a Solaris fork, I'm now beholden to one company for support at that layer. Buying a rack of Supermicro gear and running R…

I think the value proposition they're offering is a carefully integrated system where everything has been thoroughly engineered/tested to work with everything else, down to writing custom firmware to guarantee that it's all ship-shape, so that customers don't have to touch any of the innards, and will probably just treat them as a black box. It seems like it's chock-full of stuff that they custom-built and that nobody else would be familiar with, by design. If that's not what you want, this probably isn't the product for you.

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

#42

Post by capitol_ »

throwup238 wrote: post #33
refulgentis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

The best elevator pitch I've heard is "AWS APIs for on-prem datacenters". They make turn-key managed racks that behave just like a commercial cloud would with all the APIs for VM, storage, and network provisioning and integration you'd expect from AWS, except made to deploy in your company's datacenter under your control.

That just sounds like a bunch of api's on top of linux.

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

#43

Post by EvanAnderson »

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!

I'm excited to see how this compares to SmartOS. I'm pretty heavily invested in SmartOS in my personal infrastructure but its future, post-Joyent acquisition, has been worrying me.

I really wish I did work for an org big enough to use Oxide's gear. Not having to futz around with bogus IBM PC AT-type compatibility edifice, janky BMCs and iDRACs, hardware RAID controllers, etc, would be so unbelievably nice.

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

#44

Post by throwup238 »

capitol_ wrote: post #42
throwup238 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best elevator pitch I've heard is "AWS APIs for on-prem datacenters". They make turn-key managed racks that behave just like a commercial cloud would with all the APIs for VM, storage, and network provisioning and integration you'd expect from AWS, except made to deploy in your company's datacenter under your control.

That just sounds like a bunch of api's on top of linux.

Just like Dropbox is a bunch of APIs on top of FTP.

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

#45

Post by busterarm »

Not that I'm not rooting for Oxide, but their product is still so niche and early stage that I can't imagine any actual businesses buying their stuff for a long time. They only just shipped their first rack to their first customer at the end of last summer and it's Idaho National Laboratory. State research institutions are basically the only entities positioned to gamble on this right now.

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

#46

Post by GrumpySloth »

StillBored wrote: post #26
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 companie…

CentOS wasn’t used in embedded systems.

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

#47

Post by SteveNuts »

refulgentis wrote: post #29
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? :)

It seems like the folks on HN tend to think the world runs on AWS (I'm not trying to say they don't have a huge market share), but many huge enterprises still run their own datacenters and buy ungodly amounts of hardware.

The products that are on the market for an AWS-like experience on-prem are still fairly horrible. A lot of times the solutions are collaborations between vendors, which makes support a huge pain (finger pointing between companies).

Or, a particular vendor might only have compute and storage, but no offering for SDN and vice-versa. This sucks because then you have two bespoke things to manage and hope they work together correct.

These companies want a full AWS experience in their datacenter, and so far this looks to be the most promising without dedicating huge amounts of resources to something like Openstack.

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

#48

Post by temptemptemp111 »

What even is Oxide Computer? It makes no sense - it was publicized with all sorts of anti-blob, freedom, and posts about management engines and a sort of alternative to RaptorCS/IBM (which now has blobs again)... Yet most of that stuff is now buried/removed and Oxide Computer is just a hardware platform with unnecessary lock-in. For the bunker of the rich to be able to run their own mini-cloud? Sure. For anything else it seems like a bad design.

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

#49

Post by bpye »

refulgentis wrote: post #31
qmarchi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Another Xoogler here: any idea what they mean by it's not Linux at the bottom for other providers? Like, surely it's _some_ common OS? Either my binaries wouldn't run or AWS is reimplementing Linux so they can, which seems odd. Or are they just saying that the VM my binary runs on might be some predictable Linux version, but the underlying thing launching the VM could be anything?

Azure runs a version of Windows, see:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...

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

#50

Post by sunshowers »

littlestymaar wrote: post #25
steveklabnik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(I work at Oxide.)

Bryan is just one out of several illumos experts here. If none of those were around, sure, maybe we wouldn't have picked illumos -- but then we'd be unrecognizably different.

I came into Oxide with a Linux background and zero knowledge of illumos. Learning about DTrace especially has been great.

Post reply on HN