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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#671

Post by mlindner »

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…

> 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.

> Their coupling approach will most likely leave them perpetually behind

This is a startup that took years to get their initial hardware developed. The time between this version and the version using the next version of AMD chips will be shorter than the time it took to develop this product. This is not an inherent issue with coupling vs decoupling.

Also, most servers are rarely running on the most recent cpus anyway. At least in companies I've worked at with on-site hardware they're usually years (sometimes even a decade) out of date getting the last life sucked out of them before too many internal users start complaining and they get replaced.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#672

Post by steveklabnik »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #664
steveklabnik wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the area of the company I personally work on, so I don’t know those details, to be honest. We certainly make sure that everything is working properly.

So I assume there's no guarantee that it will be plug and play after the white glove installation? Otherwise I would imagine it would be a major selling point and be advertised publicly.

I mean, we absolutely sell support. I just don't know anything about the details personally. You shouldn't take my lack of knowledge as a "no," just a "steve doesn't personally know."

Re: The Cloud Computer

#674

Post by steveklabnik »

pighive wrote: post #570
steveklabnik wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not paid bonuses. We do receive stock. I took a base-pay cut to work at Oxide. Zero regrets.

Hi Steve, bit of a tangent, I stumbled upon your blog from intro section and went down the rabbit hole. Wanted to ask if you have any recommendations on documentaries. TIA!

I am unsure why you are curious about documentary recommendations from me, haha, but here's one I enjoyed quite a bit recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU

Re: The Cloud Computer

#675

Post by mkoubaa »

To people who agree with the stated premise: "Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure"

Do you think people want to design games with unreal engine on the cloud? Is there no desktop application that's safe? I don't fully accept this premise and I wonder if I'm the crazy one sometimes.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#676

Post by growse »

ninkendo wrote: post #237
growse wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. The operative bit of "cloud" is "provision and de-provision instantly via an API, without much concern for what's going on inderneath", not "lives in someone else's datacenter".

> provision and de-provision instantly via an API But that is literally not possible with hardware you purchase yourself. Sure, you can buy X amount of hardware, and provision up to X amount of virtual hardware via an API, but then what? You can't provision any more until you go and buy more hardware. This is why "cloud, but local" is a contradiction IMO. You can only be "cloud-like" if you're under-provisioning. The…

> But that is literally not possible with hardware you purchase yourself.

Sure it is. I think TFA is talking about a company selling you exactly that capability.

> You can't provision any more until you go and buy more hardware.

But this is also true of AWS etc. When their estate gets full, they need to go buy more hardware. Regardless of who owns the tin, someone's doing a capacity plan and buying hardware to meet demand.

The point of 'cloud' is that you move that function out of the domain who are actually using resources to solve business problems, which is where it traditionally sat. Historically, if you wanted to run a service, you had to go buy some hardware and hire someone to manage it for you.

A cloud-like model means that the application engineers no longer care about servers, disks and switches. Instead, they just use some APIs to request some resources and then deploy a workload onto them. The details of what hardware, where and how is fuzzy and abstracted. Or cloud-like.

> You can only be "cloud-like" if you're under-provisioning

Everyone under-provisions. Nobody runs at 100% utilisation.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#677

Post by user_7832 »

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…

> however I don't understand who this is for.

I can't think of a lot of examples right now but I can already imagine one type of customers for such a product - universities wanting high performance computing. At my alma mater, the HPC cluster/server was in a different slightly distant location. Using something like AWS wouldn't be liked by almost any uni admin, and running a server on premises isn't a great idea in a place that gets the occasional (but rare) power or internet cut. Outsourcing some of these responsibilities may have been nice for our admin.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#679

Post by growse »

steve1977 wrote: post #465
growse wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s called cloud because it’s not in your own data center. Usually cloud symbols were used in network diagrams to depict systems/networks outside of our concern. That might be true historically, because the only way you could get resources provisioned on-demand via an API from someone else who'd built it . You had to run in someone else's datacenter to get the capability which you actually wanted. Times have chang…

> Where the actual silicon lives is merely an after-thought. If you have to buy the silicon and plan capacity for it (as in the case with Oxide for example), then it cannot be an afterthought. Which is exactly why I would not consider it cloud computing.

The point is the application team doesn't have to do any of that.

Someone's always got to buy the tin and manage that. Some people are big enough that they might get a benefit from doing that themselves, rather than having Jeff Bezos do it for them.

From the application team's perspective, call API then container go whirr.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#680

Post by quickthrower2 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #314
repelsteeltje wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what iMac did for computers in about year 1999 Ehrm. What is that exactly? Are you alluding to cute design, different user interface? Or ditching then common PC component modularity? "Thinking differently"? One difference is that Oxide development was done in the open and they don't seem hell bent on creating a closed ecosystem. (Yet, at least)

I think Oxide shares one idea with Apple: hardware and software should be created for each other. In that sense, your parent is correct. You are also correct that we diverge from Apple in other ways, such as our commitment to openness, rather than secrecy.

Yes. I imagine I got downvoted because it sounds like a snark but it wasn’t meant to be.
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