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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#841

Post by grappler »

bobthecowboy wrote: post #840
grappler wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I'm really thinking mostly about the hardware part here, and maybe just enough layers of the stack to feel like an integrated hardware setup. Let the nerds play with whatever software they want above that.

To go ahead and dream a bit:

I'd hope for an online configurator like the one SoftIron's HyperCloud has [1] but instead of "talk to a sales rep", show a price for what you just configured, like you're configuring a macbook.

Relatedly, there should be a standard rack form factor in the size category of NUCs and Mac Minis, rather than having to go all the way to the 19 inch monster racks that medium to large businesses use. If it were nailed down to the point of being able to blind mate (just learned that term from Oxide's article here!) gear into it, that would be kind of perfect.

  1. https://softiron.com/hypercloud/configure/

Re: The Cloud Computer

#842

Post by wpm »

Fischgericht wrote: post #837

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 route…

Many of your questions have answers in TFM: https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction

Re: The Cloud Computer

#843

Post by mlindner »

goldinfra wrote: post #822
mlindner wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ver…

Coupling requires more integration work, including writing and testing custom firmware. Oxide will be a tiny market player for a long time, even if things go very well. Are AMD and Broadcom really going to spend as much time helping Oxide as they do helping Dell? Of course not, Oxide's order volume will be a rounding error. I'm sure they'll improve their processes over time but the lag will probably always be a non-z…

From listening to their talks they've actually gotten pretty good direct responses from AMD and AMD likes them quite a bit. They've done what no other system integrator has done and brought up the CPU without using AMD's AGESA firmware bootloader. By simplifying the system they've reduced the workload on what they need to handle.

The talk here talks about that from about 32:15 : https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...

As to your second point, unless AMD somehow becomes supply constrained and only wants to ship to their most important customers first I don't see a future where there would be any lag. Again, the delay this time is from how long it took from company start until product release. Future delays will be based on the time it takes from them getting early development parts to released products, which they could even possibly beat Dell to market on given the smaller company size and IMO more skilled employees.

> It would be surprising if they don't run into some nasty issue that leaves their customers 6+ months behind on servers or switches at some point.

I mean they've already hit tons of nasty issues, for example finding two zero-day vulnerabilities in their chosen security processor. They've shown they can work around issues pretty well.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#845

Post by mlindner »

bcantrill wrote: post #821
Always_Anon wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Dell customer for decades at this rate and I know for a fact it's true. I've had support tickets open for all kinda of weird firmware, hardware, etc. bugs and they've been well resolved, even if it meant Dell just replaced the part with something comparable (NIC swap). >Dell doesn't know how to fix things like that because they don't design and engineer the systems they sell. Of course they do. That's lik…

Ironically, it was Dell's total inability to resolve a pathological rash of uncorrectable memory errors very much is part of the origin story of Oxide: this issue was very important to my employer (who was a galactic Dell customer) and as the issue endured and Dell escalated internally, it became increasingly clear that there was in fact no one at Dell who could help us -- Dell did not understand how their own system…

As a side question, what's the name of your custom firmware that is the replacement of the AGESA bootloader? I tried searching on the oxide github page but couldn't find anything that seemed to fit that description.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#846

Post by kjellsbells »

I see lots of comments debating this technology choice or that one, as if the economic buyer actually cares. I dont think they do as much as the HN commentariat might think.

All that really matters is whether Oxide's guesses about who'll buy and what they'll pay are right.

Lets say that Oxide are guessing that their lead customers are telco and oil/gas: conservative industries, regulated, very strict about uptime and data sovereignty, etc. Oxide might spend 1 to 2 years running the gamut of all the people in those types of customers that can say no: ops, swcurity, network teams etc. But if Oxide can reach the finance team and get them to believe that a one time chunk of $$ is better than opex in the current interest rate environment, them it really doesnt matter what the tech stack is. (And bear in mind that financial models are f(t) so things might turn upside down as the economic picture changes over time)

Assuming they have done this math, (surely a yes, or else VCs would not be lending them money) Oxide must need sufficent funding for a long sales cycle, and plausible enough bench strength to support customers who are going to hold them to ruthless SLAs and penalty clauses. All of that take serious coin up front, eg theres no outsourcing your 24x7 support to some kid reading from a script.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#847

Post by mlindner »

Always_Anon wrote: post #646
jjav wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Off by a few orders of magnitude. Dell on-site SLA with pre-purchased spares was about 6 hours. You're talking about replacement parts. Yes Dell is good about that. The discussion above is asking them to diagnose and fix a problem with the interaction of various hardware components (all of which come from third parties).

Oxide also has various hardware components from AMD, Intel, Samsung, etc. They are not manufacturing every component.

But they _are_ writing the firmware that runs most of them and need to understand those devices at a deep level in order to do that, unlike Dell. Dell slaps together hardware and firmware from other vendors with some high level software of their own on top. They don't do the low level firmware and thus don't understand the low level intricacies of their own systems.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#848

Post by wpm »

dewey wrote: post #12

I always thought it's just about the hardware but it seems like it also includes it's own kind of virtualization / provisioning interface for VMs, firewalls and also an overview over running software. Does this "lock" you into the Oxide platform and you just buy into the whole thing instead of buying some server from Dell, then running some Proxmox like software and a Docker host?

The VMs are bhyve on illumos. They're about as hard to move off as moving a datacenter sized Proxmox cluster to anything else.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#849

Post by [deleted] »

Fnoord wrote: post #811
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business they're trying to build is capital-intense, and they're basically writing an OS from scratch, in addition to hardware from scratch. 78 million is actually really low

OS is not from scratch but based on proven tech like Solaris, Bhyve, Dtrace, Rust, etc. Stuff they either wrote themselves or are otherwise very familiar with.

[deleted]

Re: The Cloud Computer

#850

Post by Always_Anon »

bcantrill wrote: post #821
Always_Anon wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Dell customer for decades at this rate and I know for a fact it's true. I've had support tickets open for all kinda of weird firmware, hardware, etc. bugs and they've been well resolved, even if it meant Dell just replaced the part with something comparable (NIC swap). >Dell doesn't know how to fix things like that because they don't design and engineer the systems they sell. Of course they do. That's lik…

Ironically, it was Dell's total inability to resolve a pathological rash of uncorrectable memory errors very much is part of the origin story of Oxide: this issue was very important to my employer (who was a galactic Dell customer) and as the issue endured and Dell escalated internally, it became increasingly clear that there was in fact no one at Dell who could help us -- Dell did not understand how their own system…

Interesting enough I also ran into something somewhat related with Dell that they were not able to resolve so they ended up working in a replacement from another vendor.

Nonetheless, it is quite interesting what you've built, but as the end user I'm not quote convinced that it matters. Sure you can claim it reduces attack vectors and such but we'll still see Dells and IBMs in the most restricted and highest security postured sites in the world. Think DoD and such. Core/libreboot with RoT will get me through compliance the same.

The software management plane y'all built is the headlining feature IMHO, not so much what happens behind the scenes that the vast majority of the time will not have a fatal catastrophic upstream effect.

>There are plenty of valid criticisms of Oxide -- but that we don't understand our system simply isn't one of them.

That's not what I said. There's a line in the sand that you must cross when it comes to understanding the true nature of the componentry that you're using. At the end of the day, your AMD CPUs may be lying to you, to all of us, but we just don't know it yet.

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