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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

#71

Post by steveklabnik »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #60
steveklabnik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I do not personally agree with this. I do think that familiarity is a factor to consider, but would not give it this degree of importance.

It also was not discussed as a factor in the RFD.

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

#72

Post by _zoltan_ »

SteveNuts wrote: post #47
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? :)

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…

OpenStack is pretty smooth sailing these days and I bet you it would be much cheaper to just get 3 FTEs for your OpenStack install than an Oxide rack

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

#73

Post by _zoltan_ »

lijok wrote: post #56
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? :)

> Why would people pay a premium? I would pay a premium just to not have to deal with HPE, DELL, etc

Dell's been nothing but fantastic for us (compute, not storage.)

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

#74

Post by moondev »

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…

The main drawbacks to me are

1. No support for nested virtualization, so running a vm inside your vm is not available. This prevents use of projects such as kubevirt or firecracker on a Linux guest, and WSL2 on a Windows guest.

2. No GPU support

If the base hypervisor was Linux, it would be way more capable for users it seems. I also wonder if internally Linux is used for development of the platform itself so they can create "virtual" racks to dogfood the product without full blown physical racks.

With all that said, I do not know the roadmap and admittedly there are already quite a few existing platforms built on kvm, so as their hypervisor improves and becomes more capable it could potentially become strategic advantage.

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

#75

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

wmf wrote: post #70
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of people out there claim to know Linux, yet few can prove it. OTOH, if they gain a cult following with lots of people using their stack, those people might become more familiar with their stack than most Linux people are with theirs. They could grow a captive base of prospective hires.

That's not the big concern though. The big concern is whether vendor integration and certification becomes a stumbling block. You can hire any monkey to write good-enough code, but that doesn't give you millions in return. Partnerships with vendors and compliance certifications can give you hundreds of millions. The harder that is, the farther the money is. A totally custom, foreign stack can make it harder, or not; it depends how they allocate their human capital and business strategy, whether they can convince vendors to partner, and clients to buy in. Anything very different is a risk that's hard to ignore.

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

#76

Post by steveklabnik »

wmf wrote: post #70
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, we at the time had already hired people with deep familiarity with Linux at the time this decision was made. In particular, Laura Abbott, as one example.

It is true that the number of developers that know Linux is larger than the ones that know illumos. But this is also true of the number of developers who know C as the ones who know Rust. Just like some folks need to be onboarded to Rust, some will need to be onboarded to illumos. That is of course part of the tradeoff.

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

#77

Post by adamnemecek »

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? :)

One company making both HW and SW generally leads to really good, integrated experiences. See e.g. Apple.

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

#78

Post by littlestymaar »

steveklabnik wrote: post #59
littlestymaar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company? I don't know how to respond to this question, because to me it reads like "if things were completely different, what would they be like?" I have no idea if you could even argue that a company could be the same company with different founders. What I can say is that this line of questioning still makes me feel like you're implying t…

> we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision.

I'm not saying otherwise.

In fact, when I wrote my original comment, I actually rewrote it multiple time to be sure it wouldn't suggest I was thinking it was some sort of irrational decision (that's why I added the “it's a good fit for what they are doing”), but given your reaction it looks like I failed. Written language is hard, especially in a foreign language, sorry about that.

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

#79

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I would be interested in how did you first hear of Oxide.

I somehow landed on their podcast because it covered .

The podcast is for me amazeballs marketing - it does everything but sell their product (might be a good idea to add a pitch in for each out-tro!)

I mean they talk about it, like “we had such a tough time getting the compiler to do something something and then veer off to discuss back in the day stories.

Ah never mind. Keep talking guys hope it works out

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

#80

Post by steveklabnik »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #55
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? :)

> so the idea is vertical integration for on-premise server purchases? On custom OS? Why? Why would people pay a premium? As I understand it, re: vertical integration, the term is actually "hyperconverged". Here, that means it's designed at the level of the rack. Like -- there aren't per compute unit redundant power supplies. There is one DC bus bar conversion for the rack. There is an integrated switch designed by O…

The terminology in this space is confusing, but "hyperconverged" isn't really what we're doing. I wrote about the differences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688865

(That said I think other than saying "hyperconverged" your broad points are correct.)

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