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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#831

Post by Guvante »

layer8 wrote: post #308
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…

It may be a limited market. You need to be large enough for a private cloud to make sense, but above a certain size it also should be a no-brainer to have a competent ops team making you less dependent on a singular infrastructure provider.

The hardware only lasts five years at most. That means you have a decent cadence of repurchases.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#832

Post by bobthecowboy »

Always_Anon wrote: post #809
bobthecowboy wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I work at SoftIron. We have several HyperCloud systems in production right now. SI has been shipping purpose-built storage systems for years as the root-comment suggests, but HyperCloud (which is closer to Oxide's product) has been in production systems in defense, banking, internationally for well over a year now.

Oxides biggest selling point is the API, which can be manipulated with Terraform. I see no SoftIron Terraform plugin.

We do have a Terraform plugin in active development. It's good enough that I use it every day, but in fairness it isn't released yet.

Our API is also under active development, but it is open source today:

https://github.com/SoftIron/hypercloud-api

Go bindings included, other languages are under discussion.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#833

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

Always_Anon wrote: post #502
bcantrill wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dell now ships with OpenBMC iDRACs and such. How does what you mention differ from the RoT in Dells? https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/hardware-root-trust/

Dell uses trusted platform modules (TPM). It's a separate chipset than the BMC chipset.

For a mostly open source solution, not only would you need open source BMC firmware, you must have an open source UEFI/BIOS/boot firmware like CoreBoot, LinuxBoot, Oreboot, Uboot, etc.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#834

Post by fuzzylightbulb »

axelthegerman wrote: post #708
robertlagrant wrote: post #24

I'm a bit confused about them calling it a cloud computer. The primary benefit of cloud is you spend opex instead of capex. Isn't this moving back to capex again?

Sure but some businesses care about how much they spend and then about capex vs opex. I'd rather have $1 in capex than $10 in opex

Really depends on cash flow.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#836

Post by LoganDark »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #687
LoganDark wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

This is literally what people would do long before 'the cloud' was ever a buzzword.

Yeah because oxide.computer isn't someone else's machine anymore. It's yours.

That's literally why it's so exciting lol

Re: The Cloud Computer

#837

Post by Fischgericht »

I know that many might have by now forgotten how an actual data center works.

"One size fits all" will never work.

Here are the main headaches that someone who actually runs a data center will run into:

- How many power circuits does the DC provide you? What voltage? AC or DC?

- How many amps do the circuits have? Is the PDU provided by the DC, or do you provide it?

- How many upstreams will you have? Dual core routers? BGP? Static routing? Failover?

- Upstream provided via Fiber? Copper?

- Given that for the last couple of years being able to re-buy a typical server model (say: Supermicro), CPU, Storage for more than a couple of weeks has been a challenge, and given that rack hardware is supposed to run for years - how can I be sure to be able to scale?

- What happens if that Oxide startup goes bust 6 months from now?

- Would any sane DC operator really buy "we just built our own switch"? I wouldn't. Those who have been in that business for 20 years still f*ck it up on a regular basis. I want a proven vendor for my mission critical stuff.

I am sorry, I don't see them addressing ANY of the real life pain points you have operating your own rack. Unless they ship a couple of data center engineers within the box.

The whole cloud stuff is simply designed for managers who believe that in a job market where it's hard to find DC/server engineers that things will be magically done in the background. With this, it's worse - it's pretended that "stuff just works" if you ship it in a single box. And that's simply not a case. A DC installation not constantly maintained by skilled engineer will go down in flames within months, one way or another.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#838

Post by latchkey »

bcantrill wrote: post #829
latchkey wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure if we're talking metaphorical fans or literal ones but assuming the latter: replacement is covered under warranty. And for me personally, the "amazing shift" that you describe was in fact a decade-long experiment that left me with an inescapable conclusion: commodity hardware cannot, in fact, do the job -- and not for lack of trying!

Hi Brian, thanks for the response.

Metaphorical fans, but also fans, and everything else. It was an example from the blog post. I looked at that super innovative and cool backplane. Sure, warranty covers it for the first N years, but then what? What happens when things turn into a Tesla situation and you get horror stories of delays and poor results?

I think 'commodity' is generalized at this point. Given the choice of Supermicro and Oxide. I'm going to pick Supermicro. They can deliver me a clean rack of machines too. Why would I go with Supermicro? Big company, lots of products, lots of choices, I can work with them to get what I want.

Oxide is too singular. It is one rack, one design, one set of specifications. Don't get me wrong, there is some value in that... and I'm sure you'll sell plenty of hardware, but I'm not finding the value in it for myself. That's the part that I mean by 'commodity'.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#839

Post by mgh95 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #587
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 i…

Can you clarify a bit on what you mean by "chunk" guy? Are you alluding to the ability to distribute work by an isolation mechanism such as cgroups vs machine a-la borg/google?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#840

Post by bobthecowboy »

grappler wrote: post #828
bobthecowboy wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time. That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/fun…

This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?

If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with.

A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc.

So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there.

It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated.

Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.

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