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Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#101

Post by manoDev »

vaylian wrote: post #65

I'm trying to make sense of what this is. I don't get what the unique selling point is. I understand that this is about server hosting. And from context I gather that this is about Rust. It seems that special/custom hardware is involved. And they advocate for buying instead of renting servers. But I can't figure out more than that. Who should be interested in this product? Does it make sense to compare this to AWS, G…

It seems this is mainframe (a complete, supported, vertically integrated solution), just not from IBM.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#102

Post by rcxdude »

bananapub wrote: post #87
CamperBob2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they told Michael Dell, too.

... dell famously doesn't have one price either.

but they do generally have a price. Even if it's the super-high no-one-should-actually-pay-this price, it really helps with evaluating whether something should even be on the list to contact sales about.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#103

Post by rcxdude »

sergiotapia wrote: post #51
tehnub wrote: post #4

Is this a rebrand? I don’t remember it being called a “cloud computer”. (Or why else is this on HN?)

I agree. I remember Oxide was a balls-to-wall hardcore server "rack" soup to nuts baked by Oxide so they could provide exceptional performance and software stack. This "cloud" thing is new.

I think the core idea hasn't changed (it's generally expected that hardware like this is usually divvied up into VMs), just the branding went from 'hyperscalar for the rest of us' (which is a bit opaque to non-techies), to 'it's cloud, but in a box'.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#104

Post by NetOpWibby »

panick21_ wrote: post #94
NetOpWibby wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh neat, I can have my own DigitalOcean with one of these?!

Not quite. They don't offer out of the box managed services like DigitalOcean. No one-click MongoDB or stuff like that. No out of the box Kubernetes. You basically get Networking, Compute and Storage. Everything else you have to build on top. You will also get stuff like Terraform provider, SDKs and so on. > I can I guess if you are millionaire you could.

Ah okay, so you get the foundation. Still, pretty cool.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#105

Post by CamperBob2 »

bananapub wrote: post #87
CamperBob2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they told Michael Dell, too.

... dell famously doesn't have one price either.

Of course not. The idea was that you'd get a base price from the ad, then call Dell's 1-800 number to order and customize the system. That way you didn't have to waste time haggling with salesdroids if the price was 10x what you could afford.

They didn't just "tell him," they laughed their heads off at him. Advertising prices and selling direct Just Was Not Done. Until it was, leaving a trail of bankrupt competitors that looked like that road in Iraq.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#106

Post by kjellsbells »

Not making a value comparison here, but reminds me strongly of the "engineered systems" of the early 2000s (where you buy a box+database all in one go from HP)...and most recently of the new Nexus stuff coming out of Microsoft's acquisition of the ATT cloud people.

See https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/operator-nexus/azure-opera...

AIUI Microsoft will ask you to buy several racks worth of (oem?) server gear and switch fabric, configure it to load up their version of kubernetes, and then leave you to run whatever workloads you like (or they approve of? Not sure) with the hook being that you can manage it all from azure.

Pointed strongly at telcos, and I imagine that you cant get this without spending at least a quarter mil on hardware. Plus whatever azure fees there are? I wonder how many msft expect to sell, especially as telcos with spare cash are like unicorns.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#107

Post by jclulow »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #75
steveklabnik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at the moment, but never say never.

There needs to be a dev kit of sorts. I’d be happy to recommend Oxide to some of our customers but not before I try it first. And I’m not buying a whole data centre just to play around?

It's still early days for us obviously, but we have some of our equipment in a cage in a regular colocation facility, on the Internet. We're generally able to provide access to systems there so that folks can kick the tyres as part of a pre-sales engagement. If you or your customers are interested, you're always welcome to reach out to our sales folks and have a chat!

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#108

Post by steveklabnik »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #75
steveklabnik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at the moment, but never say never.

There needs to be a dev kit of sorts. I’d be happy to recommend Oxide to some of our customers but not before I try it first. And I’m not buying a whole data centre just to play around?

I hear you. We currently have space on a rack allocated for potential customers to kick the tires, but it's not more broadly available than that.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#109

Post by steveklabnik »

Havoc wrote: post #76
dns_snek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they're vertically integrating everything from hardware to the hypervisor/orchestration layer (something that serves the same function as Kubernetes?) along with their own developer tooling for deploying and managing workloads. edit: And it seems like it's aimed at companies that don't want to pay cloud margins, but don't (yet) have the expertise to set up a production-worthy Kubernetes (or similar) clu…

The idea of a company buying an out of the box k8s because they’re not able to set it up themselves sounds insane to me. What’s the plan when it breaks? Send the server back?

> out of the box k8s

Just to be clear, though this did seem to get cleared up below, the level of abstraction you're working with on an Oxide rack is VMs, not k8s. If you wanted to run your own k8s on top, you could.

> because they’re not able to set it up themselves sounds insane to me

It is not about ability. It's about quality, and what you want to spend time on vs what you want to spend money on. (and of course time is money...)

There's a lot that goes into building and maintaining a private cloud. Some would prefer to build it themselves, some would prefer to focus on their core business and buy something that works well out of the box.

> What’s the plan when it breaks? Send the server back?

Building a robust product is very important to us, but so is supporting it. If something breaks, you contact support, and it gets sorted.

An advantage here is because we have created almost everything ourselves, under the same roof, we have fantastic insight into how the system works. No pointing the blame at some other vendor's firmware!

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#110

Post by steveklabnik »

nilsherzig wrote: post #70
vaylian wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that Oxide sells computers that are optimized for on-premise cloud deployments?

I think they sell something like mini and on prem gcp / aws. You just connect the thing to power and ethernet and now you got your own locally running Webinterface / API which can start VMs, networks etc

This is correct, yes.
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