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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#431

Post by aeyes »

qaq wrote: post #301
bigironcto wrote: post #241

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account. As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don't understand who this is for. The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build/make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-c…

They literally had CTOs of F100 companies that want to buy this gear as part of VCs pitch. Because as you can imagine your question was the first question VC's asked.

Maybe something like Dell VXBlock didn't exist when they pitched their idea?

Any hardware contracts are very long term and you'll have a hard time getting me to switch to a different vendor, especially when they also want to come in with an unknown operating system which I have to run.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#432

Post by lamontcg »

throw-DO-178C wrote: post #362
steveklabnik wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humility is a debugger, not a code coverage tool.

HUMILITY 1. The state or quality of being humble; freedom from pride and arrogance; lowliness of mind; a modest estimate of one's own worth; a sense of one's own unworthiness through imperfection and sinfulness; self-abasement; humbleness. -- Webster's 1918 Dictionary Our avionics software was originally spec-ed to not NEED a debugger it was to be of such high quality, but the designer added break point op-codes in t…

[flagged]

Re: The Cloud Computer

#433

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bigironcto wrote: post #258
apendleton wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're mostly targeting customers who want an AWS- or GCP-like experience from a developer perspective (compute is abstracted and you can provision it with an API, etc.), but want to own their own compute infrastructure and have it on-prem. That market has mostly had to cobble together consumer-inspired HP/Cisco/whatever stuff historically (like, one of the early talks about the Oxide value proposition was c…

Thank you for the response. The problem you described has been solved by the large vendors with Hyper-converged offerings for many years so it sounds like Oxide might be a bit late to the party. I do understand well the rational of running your own servers vs hyperscalers, as well as the repatriation trend but I see Oxide at best as a niche player.

> The problem you described has been solved by the large vendors with Hyper-converged offerings for many years

All Oxide has to do to win that market is ship software and firmware that doesn't suck, because there are incumbents but the incumbents are clearly incapable of doing so.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#434

Post by taink »

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.

The only big thing missing for now is their OS (or rather, their Illumos distribution), Helios[1].

Can't wait to read its source code, I was curious since reading this thread[2].

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios (if this is not found for you, we're in the same boat)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33337086

Re: The Cloud Computer

#435

Post by NortySpock »

zozbot234 wrote: post #252
zeckalpha wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainframes!

"Real" mainframes have RAS (Reliability, Availability, Servicing) features such as hotswapping for all hardware components and automated HA/workload migration across physical racks. They can also do SSI (single system image), i.e. run a single workload across physical nodes/racks as if it was just multiple 'cores' in a single shared-memory computer. Oxide computers will probably end up doing at least some of this (na…

The Oxide and Friends podcast had an episode on virtualizing time, specifically for the purpose of live-migrating a container from rack to rack without the VM being aware, and allowing operators to take the rack offline on their schedule. Otherwise, apparently, you end up having to leave racks running because you cannot evacuate all of the containers currently running on it. (e.g. perhaps your contracts or SLAs are such that you cannot afford even the few seconds of downtime a shut-down-here-and-spin-up-elsewhere would cause)

I believe the episode name was "Virtualizing Time"

https://pca.st/episode/c10ce39c-1348-407f-b9c2-a36ced4e6be8

Re: The Cloud Computer

#436

Post by vlovich123 »

jeffrallen wrote: post #359
csomar wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I stole some of their stuff from here https://github.com/oxidecomputer/third-party-api-clients/tre... when I needed a SendGrid integration. High quality code and proper use of Rust types.

Their ring logger was really enlightening to me about the value of Rust enums. Heterogeneous log events are dropped into the ring with some holding only the fact that something happened, and others holding additional data about what happened. Then Humility is able to print out the contents of the ring either online or in crash dumps. This is how you get logging in nostdlib Rust without ending up without half of a bad…

Link?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#437

Post by asadm »

alberth wrote: post #408

The irony is that Oxide caters to the HN crowd, but the HN crowd would not be the buyer of their offerings. Old school CIO's, who make enterprise decisions without developer support, are typically the buyer of hyper-converged infrastructure (or Utility companies who struggle with CapEx vs OpEd). I wish them luck. There's a bunch really good folks over there.

Depends. HN crowd will likely prefer this over existing ones in their day job.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#438

Post by spacemadness »

wild_egg wrote: post #128
dewey wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really is one of these things where every employee in a cheap cost of living area will say "Exactly, man!" and people in an expensive area will see it differently because it might cap them lower than what they could get. I always find that a very naive point of view, of course I would want to earn a US tech salary while living somewhere in the country side, who wouldn't. But I'm also aware that this is not how t…

> of course I would want to earn a US tech salary while living somewhere in the country side It's not about what you want, it's about knowing your value. If your work is worth a SF salary then that's what you should be getting. Moving from Idaho to SF doesn't magically make you more productive. The company knows it's still getting more value from you than what you're being paid. They just want to keep more of that va…

I am so confused by this. I demand more in the Bay as Bay area landlords and their Nimby pals are exploitative jerks and California taxes and fees add up quick. Why is that cleanly separated from the discussion? I see it as more “I will demand more here than other places” vs. “I know my worth and it’s exactly X”

Re: The Cloud Computer

#439

Post by Upvoter33 »

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…

I don't see it as a big deal - rather, I see it as a huge amount of venture cap spent on some very bright people to build something no one really wants, or, at best, is niche.

Also, it has little to do with the cloud; it is yet another hyperconverged infra.

Weirdly, it is attached to something very few people want: Solaris. This relates to the people behind it who still can't figure out why Linux won and Solaris didn't.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#440

Post by the__alchemist »

dustingetz wrote: post #216
steve1977 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just hyperconverged infrastructure with a cute name?

way better explanation than the website copy "no cables no assembly just cloud" wtf is that

Hypothesis: "no cables" and "no assembly" here is analogous to the term "serverless". Or, more abstractly, the word "literally".
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