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.
We have historically had private institutions with impactful research labs. Are there any of those still kicking?
This is a really, really good point -- and is a result of the model of Linux being only a kernel (and not system libraries, commands, etc.). It means that any real use of Linux is not merely signing up for kernel maintenance (which itself can be arduous) but also must make decisions around every other aspect of the system (each with its own communities, release management, etc.). This act is the act of creating a dis…
>including much more of the system within their scope: they are not merely kernels, but also system libraries and commands. giving limited resources of the dev team it may lead to limited support of the system outside of the narrow set of officially supported/certified hardware with that support falling behind on modern hardware, as it happened with Sun, and vendor lock-in as a result into overpriced and low performi…
This is less of an issue for us at Oxide, since we control the hardware (and it is all modern hardware; just a relatively small subset of what exists out there). Part of Sun's issue was that it was tied not just to a software ecosystem, but also to an all-but-proprietary hardware architecture and surrounding platform. Sun eventually tried to move beyond SPARC and SBus/MBus, but they really only succeeded in the latter, not the former.
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 els…
It's a mainframe. You use it like you use mainframes, but probably easier, as they're adopting more modern functionality. You won't be aware you're using it, just like you aren't aware when you use a zSystem.
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 (fi…
Wouldn't a "full AWS experience in their datacenter" be AWS Outpost?
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.
This describes every single product in its early days in existence. If you're planning to launch any other way, you've doomed the company before you even launched. Lucky few survive, in spite of, and that's what contributes to the 9/10 startups statistic.
Lazer focus on the first set of customers that will help you cross the chasm. Only then mass market.
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…
I think it's a good idea to have more choice, especially in OSS. A Linux mono culture isn't any better than a chromium mono culture. They might be able to do stuff that just isn't practical if they stuck with Linux. They are also probably more familiar with illumos, or at least familiar enough to know that they can use it to do more than with linux
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 (fi…
With DHH and others promoting a post-SaaS approach (once.com, etc.) we might see hardware refresh as cost-cutting. Astronomical compute bills and lack of granularity bring all things cloudy into sharp focus.
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.
> Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months.
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 (fi…
Wouldn't a "full AWS experience in their datacenter" be AWS Outpost?
Is AWS outpost truly a full AWS stack/experience? I thought it wasn't actually meant to be a "data center in a box" experience, but more so a way to run some workloads locally when you are already using AWS for everything else.
> 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…
A team should always pick the tools they are most familiar with. They will always have better results with that, than trying to use something they understand less. With this in mind, using their own stack is a perfectly adequate choice. Factors outside their team will determine if that works out in the long term.
A handful of the team are more familiar with Illumos and the next hundred people they hire after that will be more familiar with Linux.