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…
Interesting that you bring up embedded/appliance space, as I have noticed there are plenty of FOSS alternatives coming up, key features not being Linux based, and not using GPL derived licenses.
Where, exactly, are you getting these 3FTEs qualified to touch production OpenStack infra, for more than a year, where their aggregate cost is less than a rack of equipment?
The rack doesn't require FTEs?
Not three of them; it ought to be about as difficult to administer as a single rack of hw, +Vsphere, if that.
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.
I had been using SmartOS for a long time but finally had to bite the bullet and give up. I ended up deciding on Proxmox on a ZFS root and am quite happy with it.
I've been running smartos at least since 2015 where I co-located my server. There have been times where I felt like giving up, but people like danmcd, jperkin and others always stepped in and fixed what needed to be fixed for LX to be usable and working. (Keeping java updated and running is hard, uphill battle. Thanks!)
I always ran a mixture of OS and LX zones and bcantrill's t-shirt with "Save the whales, kill your VM" made sense. I've used zones in Solaris 10 even before and they just click with me. FreeBSD's jails are nice, but far from it. And linux's cgroups are a joke. And using KVM/VMs for security containerization is just insane.
At dayjob, I've implemented multiple proxmox clusters, because we're linux shop and there's no way to "sell" smartos or tritonDC to die-hard debian colleagues, but I've managed to sell them ZFS. With personal stuff, I like my systems to take care of themselves without constant babysitting and SmartOS or OpenBSD provide just that. I don't dislike windows, I love UNIX. You could really feel those extra 20y UNIX had compared to linux.
I migrated all my stuff to proxmox for like 2 months. And then went back to SmartOS, because there was something missing ... probably elegance, sanity, simplicity or even something you'd call "hack value".
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. A…
For me, it was when Pentagram showcased their branding when Oxide was first announced.
I hope they sooner or later release a smaller, cheaper, homelab product for people to learn or for startups that will lead to future rack sales or workers.
This is a common request and we absolutely understand the desire, but I suspect such a thing, if ever, will be a long time off. Given that the product is designed as an entire rack, doing something like this would effectively be a different product for a different vertical, and we have to focus on our current business. Honestly it's kind of frustrating not being able to reciprocate the enthusiasm back in more than ju…
I appreciate the response, I totally understand and don’t expect it to materialize soon, but am still hopeful that someday it will be a possibility.
It is great that the software is open-source, but would be you useful to be deployed on other hardware?
And what would happen if, for whatever reason, a company can no longer purchase Oxide racks, will it need to start over its infra, or can it just build around Oxide hardware?
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.
It is somewhat niche, but Broadcom's purchase of VMWare now puts 0xide closer to Nutanix in that you can go buy a fully supported virtualization platform from a vendor who welcomes your business. I don't know the actual number, but it seems Broadcom is only interested in enterprise customers with huge annual spends.
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 don't about EC2 but Lambda and Fargate are presumably Firecracker, which is Linux KVM.
AWS "Nitro" hypervisor which powers EC2 is their (very customized) KVM.