Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 994 posts

Re: The Cloud Computer

#591

Post by foobiekr »

hderms wrote: post #447
foobiekr wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also future datacenter builds are going to be focusing on specific applications which means specific builds. I think Nvidia has a much better chance here with their superpod than Oxide. The target use case is pretty unclear. On-prem buyers are doing cost reduction and cost reduction targets things like, as one example, the crazy cost of GPU servers on the CSPs. Your run of the mill stuff is very hard to cost reduce.…

can you elaborate a bit? What you're saying sounds pretty interesting but I'm too ignorant to read between the lines

You don't build a new greenfield compute pod because you want to, you do it because it makes sense. Making sense is about cost and non-cost needs like data gravity and regulatory issues.

The cost case only works for GPU heavy workloads which this isn’t - wrong chassis, wrong network, etc.

Tofino2 is the wrong choice because even when they made that choice it would have been clear that it’s doa. Intel networking has not been a success center in, well, ever. That’s a selection that could only have been made for nerd reasons and not sensible business goals alignment or risk mitigation.

When you make an integrated solution you’d better be the best or close to the best at everything. This does not seem to be the best at anything. I will grant that it is elegant and largely nicer than the hyper converged story from other vendors but in practical terms this is the 2000s era rack scale VxBlock from Cisco or whatever Dell or HPE package today. Marginally better blade server is not a business.

They also make a big deal and have focused on things no one who actually builds data center pods cares about.

I actually hope they get bought by Dell or HPE or SuperMicro. Those companies could fix what’s wrong here and benefit a lot from the attention to detail and elegance on display.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#592

Post by OkayPhysicist »

cdchn wrote: post #513
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bay Area is expensive, but it's not THAT expensive.

If you've got a family to support and you need to rent or try to own a home you're going to have a tough time with 200k.

I don't know how you're coming to that conclusion. 200k's not going to buy you a large house, but it'll comfortably pay rent/food/savings for a 2-3 bedroom house or apartment for a family of 2-4 in all but the very most expensive parts of the Bay.

For mortgages, you'd need to be looking in the cheaper parts of the Bay, but that still means "dense, boring suburb" as opposed to "crime-ridden slum".

Re: The Cloud Computer

#593

Post by abbbi »

just fooling around with their demo web console ..

"A disk cannot be added or attached unless the instance is creating or stopped." "A network interface cannot be created or edited unless the instance is stopped."

really?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#594

Post by MichaelZuo »

steveklabnik wrote: post #415
MichaelZuo wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, are the specific details standardized and available in writing? Or is it more tailored to each customer?

Sorry to be slightly obtuse, which details are you referring to here? Help upon installation? At the moment, we are helping customers individually, yeah. But we do have a documented process we are following https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/rack-installation-... (and more on other pages there)

The details would be things such as the requirements associated with the white glove installation process:

Size of doorways, weight bearing capacity of floors, electrical service parameters, environmental conditions, etc.

e.g. Does it actually handle electrical voltage fluctuations of +/- 1V, or whatever is advertised?

The guaranteed parameters of a fully set up machine:

Minimum performance metrics, software compatibility with whatever the sales department promised, maximum power draw, etc.

e.g. Can it reliably hit X metric (FLOPS, IOPS, Integer calculations, etc.)?

And so on.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#595

Post by PeterCorless »

Congrats, Bryan and team! I've been following your evolution for a while now. People might just look at it and say "It's just a rack of CPUs and storage." And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them (or at least flame them in online posts).

Over the decades the separation between "software" people and "hardware" people has grown. With "cloud" people have grown comfortable papering over poor basic performance by abstracting away even your visibility into how a system is running. "You don't need to worry about that! It's ~serverless~." But you'll worry when that bill comes due at the end of the month.

With systems like Oxide, you are allowing users to once again actually see what they get, and ensure they get what they paid for, from a high-end cloud server.

It should be putting other systems providers on-notice that the days of flaky, non-performant, and poorly-integrated components are behind us. People want beasts from their servers.

And software designers, this is also your wake-up call that you can't just put lousy-performing software with poor CPU utilization and memory hogging on big metal and hope that it's "good enough." You really need to design your software to run ~efficiently~ in such systems.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#596

Post by outside1234 »

weystrom wrote: post #552
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.

Forget the numbers, just knowing that CEO is not fucking me over to build a second vacation home is Aspen would be enough for me.

Well, they didn't say the stock was the same for every employee...

Re: The Cloud Computer

#597

Post by alberth »

abbbi wrote: post #593

just fooling around with their demo web console .. "A disk cannot be added or attached unless the instance is creating or stopped." "A network interface cannot be created or edited unless the instance is stopped." really?

It's a nitpick but I thought its strange in the web console, main left navigation bar, it saying "Access & IAM".

Because IAM = Identity & Access Management

Re: The Cloud Computer

#598

Post by yencabulator »

nosequel wrote: post #585
yencabulator wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am unable to do so.

Now imagine a multi-million dollar mission critical pile of computers running on premises, and your sysadmin being able to do so.

Oxide is closer to a rack of Supermicros than AWS.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#599

Post by cryptonector »

latchkey wrote: post #521
cryptonector wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If their SW and FW source code is MPL 2.0, that's good enough to limit the extent of vendor lock-in. Sure, it would take time to take over maintenance of that code and then add support for different HW and so on, but there can be a cottage industry of consultancies that can help if ever Oxide vendor lock-in or bankruptcy becomes a problem.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#600

Post by steveklabnik »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #594
steveklabnik wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be slightly obtuse, which details are you referring to here? Help upon installation? At the moment, we are helping customers individually, yeah. But we do have a documented process we are following https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/system/rack-installation-... (and more on other pages there)

The details would be things such as the requirements associated with the white glove installation process: Size of doorways, weight bearing capacity of floors, electrical service parameters, environmental conditions, etc. e.g. Does it actually handle electrical voltage fluctuations of +/- 1V, or whatever is advertised? The guaranteed parameters of a fully set up machine: Minimum performance metrics, software compatib…

Ah yeah, so the "facilities" section of https://oxide.computer/product/specifications has some of these things, probably the closest we have to publicly publishing that in a general sense.
Post reply on HN