Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 994 posts

Re: The Cloud Computer

#281

Post by monocasa »

la64710 wrote: post #279
fefe23 wrote: post #11

This is actually a pretty big deal. They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it. It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source. So no "sorry but the third party vendor droppe…

On site backup inventory DC build out cost and effort Power cooling requirements Dark fiber bandwidth requirement New headcount to support all this No thanks , I have widgets to make and sell and a business to run.

It's meant for orgs running at a certain scale, but you'd be surprised how early that starts making sense. AWS isn't exactly paying the economy of scale savings on to you.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#282

Post by dbancajas »

benpacker wrote: post #65

I know price will vary wildly based on how many you’re buying, but does anyone have the roughest ballpark for how much it would cost to buy one (1), or like two?

Follow up question would be how much are equivalent solutions from established rack providers?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#283

Post by dcre »

aabhay wrote: post #165
weystrom wrote: post #16

> Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location. Man I would love to work for a company like that. I don't know why more people don't set their startups like that.

Works until you have to hire a designer

We have two!

Re: The Cloud Computer

#284

Post by mstade »

It bugs me more than it should that they flirt with hexadecimal numbers in their branding with the whole 0x thing, but the logo is 0xide when clearly it ought to be 0x1de. Designer came up with a clever idea but didn't understand hexadecimal, and no one had the heart to tell them? :o)

I'm kidding, mostly. The engineer in me is bothered by it, but the part of my brain that cares more about design and branding understands that 0x1de would cause inconsistencies in the branding elsewhere. (E.g. 0xDocs: https://docs.oxide.computer)

Re: The Cloud Computer

#285

Post by YorickPeterse »

loeg wrote: post #276
weystrom wrote: post #16

> Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location. Man I would love to work for a company like that. I don't know why more people don't set their startups like that.

Well, it's an immediate stumbling block to hiring anyone currently making more than that, such as senior engineers in the US.

That is only a problem if you insist on hiring people from such expensive areas. Given Oxide hires remotely, I doubt this is an actual problem for them.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#286

Post by behnamoh »

TrueDuality wrote: post #85

I'd like to add that their open source code is also EXTREMELY high quality. If you're an embedded developer go take a look at Hubris and Humility. I ended up using those to GREAT effect for this custom one-off aerospace device and it was a fantastic experience to integrate with. Definitely a change from what I was used to that took a bit of getting used to.

On a side note, I really liked their website. The ASCII animations are interesting -- wish there was a video game that had those.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#287

Post by gigatexal »

fefe23 wrote: post #11

This is actually a pretty big deal. They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it. It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source. So no "sorry but the third party vendor droppe…

Anyone know specs or prices?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#288

Post by throwaway892238 »

There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what The Cloud is that seems to pervade discussions like this. Too many technical people don't understand what they're looking at.

The Cloud is not "a computer". The Cloud is a public utility. You don't rent the transformers at an electric utility company - because why the hell would you? It's just one component of a much larger system that is valueless to the consumer without all the other components.

What these people are selling is more like a battery that you can purchase that plugs into the electric grid. But why would you want to purchase a battery? It degrades over time, losing value, and eventually needs to be recycled, and somebody has to deal with all that. Renting is the perfect way to push all of that time-consuming and complex maintenance out to someone else who can lower cost with volume.

The idea that renting servers is not sustainable would suggest that somehow computers are not like housing, cars, shop vacs, or any of the million other things you can rent. A computer is an expensive commodity like any other, and renting makes perfect sense a lot of the time.

If you need to purchase, for economic, load, tax, regulatory, or other reasons, there are already ready-made computers with (or without) service contracts and supported OSes that can be plopped into any colo, and colos sell dedicated machines already. This pitch doesn't include anything new other than buzzwords. Yeah I'm sure they did a bunch of engineering - that nobody will ever need. I'm calling shenanigans.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#289

Post by steve1977 »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #243
steve1977 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not in the bare metal/data center business anymore at the moment, but I was for more or less the last 25 years. I never had such issues. Maybe I was just lucky?

Maybe you were. :-) And maybe this is not for you or me (I haven't contacted their sales, yet) it's not for everyone. Personally, I have always been annoyed that the BIOS is clunky and every change requires a reboot, taking several minutes. As computers got faster over the years, this has gotten worse, not better. At the core of cloud economics is elasticity: don't pay for a service that you don't use. Wouldn't it be…

> Wouldn't it be great to power down an idle server, knowing that it can be switched on seconds before you actually need it?

considering you would still need to boot the VMs then, once the Oxide system is up, I’m not sure if this is such a big win.

And at a certain scale you’d probably have something like multiple systems and VMware vMotion or alternatives anyway. So if the ESXi host (for example) takes a while to boot, I wouldn’t care too much.

And, economics of elasticity - you’d still have to buy the Oxide server, even if it’s idle.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#290

Post by rwmj »

paxys wrote: post #230
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #227

> We’re really excited to have the first commercial cloud computer — and for it to be generally available! If you yourself are interested, we look forward to it making its first impression on you — reach out to us! Can we please stop with the "the only way to get our pricing is by booking a sales call with us." This is a 100% surefire way for me to never pay for your product, and instead go to competitors who provide…

Their pricing starts at $500K (but realistically will be $1-2M per order at a minimum). This is not intended for people who browse their website, click "buy" and fill in their credit card info. If you don't want to talk to a sales rep you were never their target customer, and I'm sure they aren't sweating the hypothetical lost sale.

I still don't get why they can't put a price on the website.
Post reply on HN