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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#481

Post by benjaminleonard »

mstade wrote: post #284

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 understa…

You may be happy (or unhappy) to know that was definitely considered – it felt a little more trouble than it was worth, and dare I say a little too on the nose?

We did manage to get a neat PCI vendor ID: https://pcisig.com/membership/member-companies?combine=01de

Re: The Cloud Computer

#482

Post by novok »

layer8 wrote: post #369
Nilithus wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this changes the calculus. If you don't need as much of an ops team to go private cloud. Then you might not need to be as large before it makes sense.

By a private cloud making sense, I mean the lower bound for being an Oxide customer, i.e. having the budget to buy the infrastructure with enough headroom for usage spikes and expected near-term growth. The reasons why you otherwise would go public cloud when you’re still small. The reduced need for an ops team with Oxide was already factored in.

So uber did private cloud, then went to public cloud recently because the balance was not worth it ( and they probably had enough scale to negotiate a good price, like netflix ) . If they were on something like oxide which reduced infra management costs a lot staffing wise and negotiated a bulk deal, would’ve they gone the public cloud route?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#483

Post by wmf »

flumpcakes wrote: post #201
osti wrote: post #190

They use Tofino as the networking switch. But Intel is discontinuing Tofino so I'm wondering what does future upgrade path look like for Oxide? Would they consider something like a p4 programmable DPU as the replacement?

Oxide racks curren use AMD CPUs and and after buying Pensando AMD now offer P4 DPUs. I would hazard a complete guess and say maybe a move from Tofino to Pensando is on the cards for future networking revisions.

DPUs can't really replace switches. Maybe they could just keep using Tofino for the next N years until something better comes along.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#484

Post by twicetwice »

gleb wrote: post #397
steveklabnik wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not trying to be dismissive, I was just explaining since there was some confusion.

I'll try to explain, not in the spirit of being argumentative, but with the hope of being useful. The comment you replied to was not questioning the value of integrated cabling. It was pointing out that the product description on the site does not make sense. "Cloud computer" sounds like a server you rent from AWS. It's kind of like calling Rust "cloud compiler." If you choose to use words that your audience doesn't…

Perhaps if you don't understand what the copy means, then that is a sign that you are not the target audience, rather than that the copy is bad? From what I've gathered from reading other comments in this thread, that copy will make perfect sense to Oxide's target audience, as it uses words in a way that will be very familiar and make perfect sense to the kind of person who might make a purchasing decision for a system like this.

And for what it's worth, I don't think you need to explain what's happening to Steve, it seems to me that he understands perfectly well. To me you come across as being rather condescending and in my opinion Steve is being commendably polite in response.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#485

Post by mkeeter »

vlovich123 wrote: post #436
jeffrallen wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The embedded side is here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris/blob/master/lib/ring...

And the debugger is here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/humility/blob/master/cmd/ri...

I also gave a talk at this year's Open Source Firmware Conference that covers a bunch of debug strategies: https://www.osfc.io/2023/talks/unplugging-the-debugger-live-...

(conference videos aren't online yet, but should be posted early next week)

Re: The Cloud Computer

#486

Post by avhception »

josephcsible wrote: post #478

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 – crypt…

Not sure about the tivoization. You could never send a pull request to the Tivo repo on Github, because it does not exist. And maybe the Oxide hardware allows you to change the certificates so you can roll your own?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#487

Post by cedws »

DonnyV wrote: post #330
apexalpha wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn that's insane. As someone from Europe these salaries are just extreme. If ya'll are looking for a remote security engineer from Europe hit me up. :) For those numbers I'll walk the servers into the customers myself.

Salary is that high in the US because we have no social net or price caps here. Your on your own for everything. Healthcare, retirement, overpriced homes, out of control rent, etc

>overpriced homes, out of control rent

Plenty of that in London unfortunately and our salaries are half.

>Healthcare

And not so much of that... despite paying tax for it anyway.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#488

Post by slibhb »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #386
slibhb wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that people should be paid according to experience, ability, and effort is absolutely not the labor theory of value. The idea that contribution "can't really be measured" is a cop-out. Contribution can't be measured perfectly but it can be estimated with some accuracy by people who are involved in day-to-day work. "Some accuracy" is really all that's required: as long as contribution is correlated with compens…

> Contribution can't be measured perfectly but it can be estimated with some accuracy by people who are involved in day-to-day work This is handwaving in the extreme. Anyone involved in software development knows that a single line of code can be critical to success or failure, as can a blob of 100k LOC, so product-quantity metrics are of almost no use. The "estimate" you're talking about generally comes down to gene…

Life is full of handwaving. In almost any workplace, it's very simple to know who's doing the work (and it's usually a shockingly small number of people). It's the idea that we can reduce this to a mathematical formula (the opposite of handwaving) that's odd.

> The "estimate" you're talking about generally comes down to general "feelings" about who works hard, which have repeatedly been shown to be poor metrics for actual contributions.

How has this been "shown"? Anyway, you're begging the question that there's some way to determine "actual contributions" that we can compare to "feelings".

If you actually work with a group of people on a daily basis and can't rank order them in terms of usefulness, I find that astonishing. And remember, rankings don't have to be perfect, they just have to more accurate that random.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#489

Post by dcre »

tivert wrote: post #215

That website is interesting. Maybe it's a Firefox bug, but when I load the page with NoScript on, the text is very weird, like this: > TODay WE aRE aNNOUNCING tHe It's actually much weirder than that, as some of the capitals in my quote are actually big lowercase letters, not capitals (i.e. the opposite of smallcaps).

Can't repro in FF with JS off (not exactly NoScript). Could it be an extension doing something weird? Curious if you see normal text when you view source on the page.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#490

Post by necovek »

Voultapher wrote: post #448
Upvoter33 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there are many situations where the financials and or enabled options of owning something make a lot of sense. Right now, the kind of experience you get with AWS and co. can only be rented, not bought. Some people want to buy houses instead of renting them.

Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case.

And Canonical played with a cluster-in-a-box all the way back in 2013-2014: https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-unde...

You could turn it into an OpenStack cloud in ~20 mins with an automated Juju OpenStack install.

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