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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#491

Post by LoganDark »

alberth wrote: post #251
LoganDark wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're selling a rack that hosts an entire virtual cloud. Nobody has done that yet. There have been servers with hypervisors preinstalled, but nothing like this.

Oracle, AWS & Azure all have "Cloud at Customer" offerings. And these offerings have existed for years. And from hardware manufacturers, Dell/VCE, Nutanix, and more "hyper-converged" infra has existed. Note: I'm not being a hater. I'm just genuinely confused. --- https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cloud-at-customer/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-stack https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

> Oracle, AWS & Azure all have "Cloud at Customer" offerings.

AFAIK they manage it for you, as if you're just a colo. Whereas oxide just hands the entire rack + software over, but with no self install of any software stacks required (such as with azure)

Re: The Cloud Computer

#493

Post by necovek »

Canonical did something similar back in 2014 but mostly for demo purposes with "Orange Box": the promise was that you could easily do it with any available hardware.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#494

Post by FromOmelas »

jpdb wrote: post #22

I really wish oxide had a Homelab/consumer centric offering! Spec wise, some low power systems like an Intel NUC, LattePanda Sigma, or Zimaboard. You could fit 3/4 of them in a single 1u with a shared power supply. They could even offer a full 1u with desktop grade chips on the same sleds. I have thought about building one myself, but it's a large investment of time that I can't seem to find lately.

seconded. it would provide an on-ramp to get familiar with the software without forking over 500k

Re: The Cloud Computer

#495

Post by bcantrill »

Always_Anon wrote: post #452
Voultapher wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Their competition has open source firmware as well: https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-syste...

So OpenBMC is fine (happy for them!), but having open firmware is much deeper and broader than that: yes, it's the service processor (in contrast to the BMC which is a closed part on Dell machines) -- but it's also the root-of-trust and (especially) the host CPU itself. We at Oxide have open source software from first instruction out of the AMD PSP; I elaborated more on our approach in my OSFC 2022 talk.[0]

[0] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...

Re: The Cloud Computer

#496

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

slibhb wrote: post #488
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> And remember, rankings don't have to be perfect, they just have to more accurate that random.

No, they have to better than both random and "everyone is, on average, and over an extended period of time contributing roughly the same". That's quite a challenge.

Do you go to customers and ask them which features provide the most value to them, and then follow the code back to the people who implemented them? Do you go to the customers who paid the most, and repeat the question to them only?

We're not talking about some award-prize ceremony speech in which we acknowledge that Dmitri and Aneka led the work to get version 8.0 which has been a huge success. We're talking about actual salaries, which are presumably linked in some way to actual sales, and I'm insisting that connecting individual developer efforts to the sales numbers is extraordinarily hard. "More" and "less" are not enough to come up with actual numbers.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#497

Post by lostdog »

goldinfra wrote: post #403
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…

Coupling vs Decoupling is not some one-sided thing. It's a major trade-off. One of the most obvious examples of the problem with this approach is that they're shipping previous generation servers on Day 1. One can easily buy current generation AMD servers from a number of vendors. They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendors that are forced to compete head-to-head for a specific role (ser…

If they standardize and open the server shape and plug interface then it gets really cool. Then I could go design a GPU server myself and add it to their rack. The rack is no longer a hyperconverged single-user proprietary setup and becomes something that can be extended and repurposed.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#498

Post by pclmulqdq »

aidenn0 wrote: post #460
cdchn wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>plug in networking and power No cables, except for a few cables.

They mean no intra-rack cables, which are the overwhelming majority of cables on a typical rack.

This is pretty big, as someone who has deployed servers to datacenters before. Remote hands are very good at plugging in the network uplink and the PDUs. Doing a complete leaf-spine 25GbE network with full redundancy is something they are pretty much guaranteed to screw up at some point.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#499

Post by [deleted] »

flumpcakes wrote: post #278

I think a lot of commenters here have little experience with hyper-converged infrastructure if they don't see this is different. This looks, by far, the simplest way to run workloads outside of the big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). It seems they only support up to virtual machines but this is still miles ahead of VMWare, Nutanix, or CISCO ACI to my eyes. This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps…

[deleted]

Re: The Cloud Computer

#500

Post by cryptonector »

apexalpha wrote: post #199
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.

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.

That's probably [EDIT: decidedly] on the low side for the bay area for rock star devs, and Oxide has lots of rock star devs. I haven't looked but I assume they pay bonuses, probably differential bonuses.
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