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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#471

Post by bee_rider »

cdchn wrote: post #423
guhidalg wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F100 waste so many millions already on projects that never see the light of day, why couldn't they throw money at Oxide and see if it works better than their AWS contract?

Megacorp Boondoggles sounds like a lucrative market.

I wonder how to break into it.

I bet the trick is to keep the perfect balance of high profile wins and and losses. You want to be defensible as an expert to the non-technical folks while obviously a fall guy to the technical ones I guess.

I think these guys aren’t that, though, they seem to be selling a real, cool product.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#472

Post by novok »

With the rack being so quiet, I wonder if they would ever sell these in smaller versions for more local installations. Would be pretty niche, but it would be interesting. Same kinds of markets that ui.com tries to serve.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#473

Post by cashsterling »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #439
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…

Back in the day... Sun Micro was a GOAT and pushed the envelope on Unix computing 20-30 years ago. Solaris was stable and high performing.

I don't run on-prem clusters or clouds but know a couple people who do and, at large enough scale, it is a constant "fuck-shit-stack on top of itself" (to quote Reggie Watts). There is almost always something wrong and some people upset about it.

The promise of a fully integrated system (compute HW, network HW, all firmware/drivers written by experts using Rust wherever possible) that pays attention to optimizing all your OpEx metrics is a big deal.

It may take Oxide a couple more years to really break into the market in a big way, but if they can stick it out, they will do very well.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#474

Post by dthul »

cryptonector wrote: post #446
throw0101a wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They sell servers, but as a finished product. They sell rack-as-compute.[0] Their minimum order is one rack: You plug in power and network, connect to the built-in management software (API), and start spinning up VMs. [0] With built-in networking and storage.

It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container. Cooling, power supply, compute, storage, and network, all in a box. You supply power, a big network pipe, and the piping to external heat exchangers.

I know one company who offers that (there might be more): https://www.grando.ai/en/container

Re: The Cloud Computer

#475

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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…

Being in SF makes the market for your labor more competitive. If I'm living on a ranch in rural Idaho, I would interact with very few people on a given day, and most of them would be the same people I interacted with yesterday. In SF, I'd be interacting with far more people, and far more new people, with a much higher probability of those people working in tech, some subset of whom will be willing to offer me a job.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#476

Post by steveklabnik »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #439
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…

Just to be clear, Illumos (it hasn't been Solaris in a very long time) is an implementation detail. It's not customer facing.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#478

Post by josephcsible »

They say this:

> While the software is an essential part of the Oxide cloud computer, what we sell is in fact the computer. As a champion of open source, this allows Oxide a particularly straightforward open source strategy: our software is all open.

But their homepage says this:

> As soon as power is applied to an Oxide rack, our purpose-built hardware root of trust – present on every Oxide server and switch – cryptographically validates that its own firmware is genuine and unmodified.

That sounds like tivoization to me. The value of their software being open source is heavily diminished by their hardware refusing to run anything but their "genuine and unmodified" software.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#479

Post by wmf »

andrewstuart wrote: post #5

I wonder how effective AMD 7840 would be as a cloud CPU. 8 cores, fast GPU, AV1 video encoder. Tiny SBC machines …. you could probably stack a bunch of them in a rack. https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4-7840U-1U https://youtu.be/WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=zMYn2Gf3vTe-qMl8 https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-7840u

"Microserver" designs have failed several times. AMD Epyc is basically twelve 7840s in an even smaller space and you can partition it any way you want.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#480

Post by wmf »

gizmo wrote: post #67
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird criticism, for anything involving CapEx it will always require an RFQ and quote. You're not buying a bag of peanuts and they will likely price it differently if you're buying 1x or 500x.

In fairness, the blogpost argues that owning is more economical than renting. Everybody knows what cloud compute costs and if this more economical then maybe there should be some price indicator?

Yeah, the price has to be somewhere between a Supermicro rack and an Outpost rack.
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