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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#581

Post by yencabulator »

jjav wrote: post #571
yencabulator wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same is true of Oxide, it'll be up to actual experience to see how well it works. Oxide seems to have written their own distributed block storage system ( https://github.com/oxidecomputer/crucible ), have their own firmware, kernel and hypervisor forks, etc -- when any of that breaks, good luck!

> Oxide seems to have written their own ... > when any of that breaks, good luck! The premise is that you don't need luck, you can call Oxide. As you said, they wrote all of it, so they own all the interaction so they can diagnose all of it. When I call Dell with a problem between my OS filesystem and the bus and the hardware RAID, there's at least three vendors involved there so Dell doesn't actually employ anyone t…

That's the same premise as with all "turn-key" solutions. If it didn't come with software support, it wasn't really turn-key.

The rest comes down to execution. Sure, we all have high hopes for Oxide. Sure, we all hate established players like Dell.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#582

Post by johncowan »

panick21_ wrote: post #375
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…

I think they are a competitor to the 'HP/Cisco/IBM/Dell... (blades or hyper-converged)' part of this. They basically saying 'we will do it better'. Their marketing and story is supposed to convince you that you could save money running their things rather then Dell. And instead of paying for VMWare you get Open Source Software for most of it. > Until this company has a certain/size and scale, no one serious will trus…

I remember the first time I heard of someone being fired for buying IBM, a thing that many people thought would never happen.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#583

Post by qaq »

wmat wrote: post #538

What am I missing here? Hasn't SoftIron been building this exact thing for around 5 years? Heck, they design and manufacture all of the hardware as well. https://softiron.com/hypercloud/ https://softiron.com/blog/run-bmc-why-we-decided-to-build-ou...

Not being familiar with SoftIron but I would imagine there can be more than one company working in a given niche? Why would it be surprising?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#584

Post by 0x457 »

troupe wrote: post #541
steveklabnik wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those are two different things. To be super clear about it, this is referring to not needing to cable up all of the individual sleds to the rack upon installation. It doesn't mean that we recommend connecting a rack of compute to your data center via wifi.

Cdchn was hoping that it had a Starlink antenna built into the rack. :)

powered by tesla coil

Re: The Cloud Computer

#585

Post by nosequel »

yencabulator wrote: post #505
steveklabnik wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It'll become customer facing the moment something doesn't work right.

If you have a bug in how a lambda function is run on AWS, do you find yourself looking for the bug in firecracker? It is open source, so you technically could, but I just don't see many customers doing that. Same can be said about KNative on GCP.

Their choice in foundation OS (for lack of a better term) really should not matter to any customer.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#587

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Its a huge deal. I'm biased though because my own takes on how things should evolve were very similar. I was however completely unsuccessful in getting those ideas into production! And that, that is a huge deal. Through out my career it has been interesting to meet people with great ideas and then they are unable to get them into production, and when the idea does come into production everyone feels like "Wow, this is so obvious why didn't we do it sooner?" and some folks are banging their head against the wall :-).

One of the more interesting discussions I had during my tenure at Google was about the "size" of the unit of clusters. If you toured Google you got the whole "millions of cheap replaceable computers" mantra. Sitting in Building 42 was a "rack" which had cheap PC motherboards on "pizza dishes" without all that superfluous sheet metal. Bunches of these in a rack and a festoon of network cables. What are the "first class" elements of these machines? Compute? Networking? Storage? Did you replace components? Or a whole "pizza slice" (which Google called an 'index' at the time). Really a great systems analysis problem.

FWIW I'm more of a "chunk" guy (which is the direction 0xide went) and less of a "cluster" guy (which is the way Google organized their infrastructure). A lot of people associated with 0xide are folks I worked with at Sun in the early days and during that period the first hints of "beowulf" clusters vs "super computers", was memory one thing (UMA) or did it vary from place to place (NUMA). I have a paper I wrote from that time about "compute viscosity" where the effective compute rate (which at the time largely focused on transactional databases) scaled up with resource (more memory more transactions/sec for example) and scaled down with viscosity (higher latencies to get to state meant fewer transactions/sec) Sun was invested heavily in the TPC-C benchmarks at the time but they were just one load pattern one could optimize for.

These guys have capitalized on all that history and it is fucking amazing! I just hope they don't get killed by acquisition[1].

[1] KbA is a technique where people who are invested in the status quo and have resources available use those resources to force the investors in a disruptive technology to sell to them and then they quietly bury the disruptive technology.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#588

Post by burnte »

steveklabnik wrote: post #476
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…

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

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

Solaris is still Solaris, as of the latest release last month. OpenSolaris hasn't been OpenSolaris in a while and is Illumos, yes.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#589

Post by cryptonector »

jjav wrote: post #559
cryptonector wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container. Sun did that experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Modular_Datacenter

Yeah, I'm aware, but I didn't think they were serious about it.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#590

Post by Always_Anon »

jjav wrote: post #555
necovek wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 min…

> 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. Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? If you haven't lived through this, the answer is: nob…

>Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix?

Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues.

With Oxide you're locked into what looks like a Solaris derivative OS running on the metal and you're only allowed to provision VMs which is a huge disadvantage.

I run a fleet of over 30,000 nodes in three continents and the majority is Flatcar Linux running on bare metal. Also have a decent amount of RHEL running for specific apps. We can pick and choose our bare metal OS which is something you cannot do with Oxide. That's a tough pill to swallow.

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