151–160 of 268 posts
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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
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?
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>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…
Well they aren't burdened by having to make their own processors, like Sun had to do, or their own full custom chips in general. They just have to support the selection of hardware they pick, and they have complete oversight of what hardware runs on their racks. So I'm not sure if the sun comparison is relevant here, since they can still pick top of the line hardware. Just not any hardware
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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?
Old AWS used to be Xen, Nitro afaik uses customised VMM and I don't recall if it's not a custom OS or hosted on top of something. Azure is Hyper-V underneath IIRC, a custom variant at least (remember Windows Server Nano? IIRC it was the closest you could get to running it), with sometimes weird things like network cards running Linux and integrating with Windows' built-in SDN facility. Rest of the bigger ones is main…
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> 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.)
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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.
I guess the wildcard is price. AWS's pricing model works kinda at their OMG eyewatering scale - aka all the custom hardware they design is highly cost optimized, but just doing custom hardware has a notable cost. This is easily covered by their scale, to make for their famous margins. [during their low scale times, they did use a good bit of HP/Dell, etc] Oxide seems to be no different (super custom hardware) only ma…
I'm really curious: what kind of workload would companies want to run on a custom Unix that isn't Linux/Mac/BSD? I'm rooting for more mature OS diversity, I just have no idea who the end users would be and what their needs would look like.
There's a good argument that your servers in the cloud don't need to be on the same OS, as long as you can hire enough talent to work on them.
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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
In contrast, it appears that Oxide is committing to open-source the equivalent pieces of their virtualization platform.
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…
Keep in mind that Helios is really just an implementation detail of the rack; like Hubris[0], it's not something visible to the user or to applications. (The user of the rack provisions VMs.) As for why an illumos derivative and not something else, we expanded on this a bit in our Q&A when we shipped our first rack[1] -- and we will expand on it again in the (recorded) discussion that we will have later today.[2] [0]…
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I don't expect anyone to see my comments unless they're really looking since I've been shadow banned for many years now - so I appreciate your reply. To be clearer regarding my questions: - What happened to Project X (supposedly coreboot++ for latest AMD CPUs)? It seems dead, despite being more reported on than Oxide's attempts in working with AMD (to achieve the same outcomes, presumably - what's the difference?). L…
So, your comment was not dead when I saw it. This reply was, but apparently now has been vouched for. > What happened to Project X (supposedly coreboot++ for latest AMD CPUs)? I don't recall what you're referring to specifically, maybe this was a thing before I started at Oxide. I do know that we deliberately decided to not go with coreboot. I believe the equivalent component would be phbl[1]. It boots illumos direct…
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Yes! Crucible[0] is on our list of upcoming episodes. We can touch on it tonight, but it's really deserving of its own deep dive! [0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/crucible
The timing of your podcast is the least convenient thing ever for us poor Europeans. And then the brutal wait the next day until its uploaded. The only thing I miss about Twitter Spaces is that you could listen the morning after.
I am looking forward to the crucible episode. It sounds like it could be a startup on its own, it wouldn't be the first distributed file/ storage system company.