Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like these guys just reinvented mainframes.
The Cloud Computer
461–470 of 994 posts
Re: The Cloud Computer
#462I was reading until I saw green and some type of rack looking thing, wait I thought it was not a rack!
seriously, great job. let me own it first.
Re: The Cloud Computer
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
So just hyperconverged infrastructure with a cute name?
Mainframes!
Re: The Cloud Computer
#464I'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.
They are very fun to make as well! I've built my own mini-lib on top of this ASCII rendering library (https://github.com/ertdfgcvb/play.core).
I design them in Monodraw, pass it through a janky converter I wrote that converts text into a json grid of characters. I then render a number of layers that get combined, which is a mix of the static art layer, and others generated from functions that spit out a similar cell based frame.
If you're interested: https://gist.github.com/benjaminleonard/c913ddbf23fe7a70f9c2...
And for what it's worth there's this ASCII game: https://twitter.com/StoneStoryRPG
Re: The Cloud Computer
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s called cloud because it’s not in your own data center. Usually cloud symbols were used in network diagrams to depict systems/networks outside of our concern. Also you could don’t really get elasticity with a system like this. If anything, that would be the operative bit for me.
> It’s called cloud because it’s not in your own data center. Usually cloud symbols were used in network diagrams to depict systems/networks outside of our concern. That might be true historically, because the only way you could get resources provisioned on-demand via an API from someone else who'd built it . You had to run in someone else's datacenter to get the capability which you actually wanted. Times have chang…
> Where the actual silicon lives is merely an after-thought.
If you have to buy the silicon and plan capacity for it (as in the case with Oxide for example), then it cannot be an afterthought. Which is exactly why I would not consider it cloud computing.
Re: The Cloud Computer
#466This 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…
The fact that it's not on linux is one of the great things about it. There is too much linux on critical infrastructure already and the monoculture just keeps on growing.
At least with Oxide there is a glimmer of hope for a better future in this regard.
Re: The Cloud Computer
#467Love it.
Re: The Cloud Computer
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may not be aware of the pain that many large, non-software companies currently have on AWS. Gigantic monthly bills (hundreds of thousands per month) coming from subdivisions that aren't capable or motivated to reduce their AWS budget or usage. To the office of the CTO, Oxide's value proposition (buy instead of rent) could be very motivating. "Hey subdivision A, could we buy a few Oxide racks and move your workloa…
Most people who can do this (aren't as entrenched in AWS) end up moving to a cheap VPS provider so that they don't end up having to pay for all the internetworking, facilities, throw redundancy out the window, and then still have to pay the IT burden to heavy-lift all their workloads to this whole new "Oxide" system.
> end up moving to a cheap VPS provider
Like which?
Re: The Cloud Computer
#469This 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…
When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux.
Yes they are using illumos/Solaris to host this but they don't sell on that, they sell on the functionality of this layer — allowing people to deploy to owned infra in a way that is similar to how they'd deploy to AWS or Azure. How much do you ever think about the system hosting your VM on those clouds? You think about your VMs, the API or web interface to deploy and configure, but not the host OS. With Oxide racks the customers are not maintaining the illumos substrate (as long as Oxide is around).
You could be right about demand, there is risk in a venture like this. But presumably the team thought about this - I think folks who worked at Sun, Oracle, Joyent, and Samsung and made SmartOS probably developed a decent sense of market demand, enough to make a convincing case to their funders.
Re: The Cloud Computer
#470As a HPC guy, I really like the idea of one or two of these racks serving as the cluster front end, providing the login nodes, controllers, etc. You would still need generic servers for the main bulk of the compute for density and cost reasons, but it would basically make the back-end part of the cluster into an interchangeable blob of cores, allowing us to focus on the interesting bits of running a service.