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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#521

Post by latchkey »

cryptonector wrote: post #459
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…

Bryan Cantrill is famously against vendor lock-in. He wrote a[n in]famous blog about the "FYO point" while at Sun. Oxide may be going for customers that also have the same aversion to vendor lock-in. One thing that Bryan understands is that you can "lock" the customer in with great products and services, as well as continuing development, while also making the customer feel secure in having a way out should you turn…

Oxide is the definition of vendor lock in. All of their hardware is unique... even down to the choice of fans. Fan burns out? Now you've got to buy another one... from them.

One of the amazing shifts in the last 20 years was realizing that commodity hardware, when deployed correctly, could do the job.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#522

Post by systemvoltage »

closeparen wrote: post #416
keepamovin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, man! That's the way it should be done. It's not a company's business to decide how much your life should cost. It's its business to reward you for the value you provide, and that value is not tethered to your location, so neither should be your salary!

Location independence is not the interesting part of Oxide’s compensation strategy. It’s that everyone makes exactly the same. There are no negotiations, no levels, no promotions, and consequently no promo packets or promo projects. This is extremely enticing to FAANG types who are tired of a certain kind of bullshit, at the cost of a certain level of ambition.

I wonder if they offer equity. Hierarchies always form, they tried this with Gore Associates in Arizona (totally flat company structure) and has major problems.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#523

Post by sbarre »

Voultapher wrote: post #313
bigironcto wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Genuine question, you mention Hyper-converged, can you point to anything that comes even close to the experience you presumably get from the Oxide offering.

Part of the problem here is that the people who make the purchasing decisions (like this CTO guy) don't care about "the experience" because they're not the ones unpacking boxes and plugging in cables.

They pay other people to do that and they don't really care if it's a miserable time. And if it takes days instead of hours, who cares? Rarely is someone setting up a data center under the gun (unless you're Elmo and we all saw how that went).

Factors like scalability and ongoing support are much more top of mind.

Not saying that Oxide can't address this, and I love Oxide's focus on the experience, but I think this bottom-up approach to convincing customers is going to be a steep climb..

But they seem to be up for steep climbs, so I wish them all the best!

Re: The Cloud Computer

#524

Post by steveklabnik »

systemvoltage wrote: post #522
closeparen wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Location independence is not the interesting part of Oxide’s compensation strategy. It’s that everyone makes exactly the same. There are no negotiations, no levels, no promotions, and consequently no promo packets or promo projects. This is extremely enticing to FAANG types who are tired of a certain kind of bullshit, at the cost of a certain level of ambition.

I wonder if they offer equity. Hierarchies always form, they tried this with Gore Associates in Arizona (totally flat company structure) and has major problems.

We are compensated with equity, yes.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#525

Post by _a_a_a_ »

Without JS this site's text is a weird mix of upper and lower case letters, even within the same word. Even large lowercase mixed in. The underlying text is perfectly normal. Can any web devs suggest why this is? TIA

Re: The Cloud Computer

#526

Post by sbarre »

brundolf wrote: post #401
candiddevmike wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. It's one thing to be left holding the bag when a SaaS startup goes under, but when you just spent millions on gear that is now completely unsupported... eek. I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.

> completely unsupported That equation changes with the entire software stack being open-source

What about the hardware?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#527

Post by repelsteeltje »

steve1977 wrote: post #405
repelsteeltje wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considering you would still need to boot the VMs then, once the Oxide system is up, I’m not sure if this is such a big win. To be honoust, I'm using containers most of the time these days but even the full blown windows VMs I'm orchestrating boot in less than 20s, assuming the hypervisor is operational. I think that's about on par with public cloud, no? > [...] vMotion [...] ESXi. Is VMware still a thing? Started w…

Re VMware, it’s certainly still a thing in enterprise environments. Can kvm do things like live migration in the meantime? For me it’s the other way round, haven’t looked into that for a while ;) How do you mean Oxide might have that advantage as well in the future? As I understand, you have to buy hardware from them?

Ah yes live migration, off course. We design "ephemeral" applications that scale horizontally and use load balancer to migrate. With 99% of traffic serviced from CDN cache updates and migrations have a very different set of challenges.

As to your question, I meant to say that as volumes and scales economies increase they can source materials far cheaper than regular shops. Possibly similar to AWS, gcs, Azure, akamai etc. It would be nice if they were able and willing to translate some of those scales economies into prices commensurate with comparable public cloud instances.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#528

Post by systemvoltage »

closeparen wrote: post #444
cdchn wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selecting for lack of ambition may have some negative consequences on your businesses' ambition.

But the problems of engineers optimizing architectures and project plans for their career trajectory over business need are also well-known.

Yeah this I’ve seen everywhere, but more related to the company size. In a 50 employee company, it’s hard to pull that off. As organizations get larger, you get this as inevitable part of human nature. If the salary table is flat, then highly ambitious people will ask for more skin-in-the-game.

The skin-in-the-game bit can be promotions, equity, stock compensation, etc.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#529

Post by anewlanguage »

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.

AWS does that already for the defense industry: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-aws-mod...

Re: The Cloud Computer

#530

Post by xur17 »

ren_engineer wrote: post #229
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.

I'd imagine they'll get to that eventually, these types of companies generally start at enterprise level because that's the most profitable and requires closing smaller numbers of deals. Once the product is proven and their support infrastructure is in place they can go for other market segments to try and maximize revenue

It's not just about maximizing revenue, it's also about getting it into developer hands early (homelabs, side projects, college students, etc) so they can become familiar with it, and become an advocate for it within their company. Cloudflare is a good example of this.
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