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The Cloud Computer

oxide.computer

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Re: The Cloud Computer

#851

Post by wpm »

robertlagrant wrote: post #157
jbiggley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the line we were sold by cloud vendors. There is a reason that significant portions of both native cloud and migrated workloads are shifting back to self-hosted; the cost savings never materialized. My google-fu failed to find any articles for or against my statement that weren’t paid advertising or lightweight tech summaries. StackOverflow will have to do. https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/02/20/are-companies…

Of course - every pay as you go service that goes above a certain amount of utilization will be better replaced with up front investment. But that doesn't mean that the opex model is bad in general; you've just only picked cases where it's bad.

So, what you're saying is, that whether opex or capex models are better or not...depends? That there is no silver bullet, golden gun, one-size-fits-all platitude anyone can post in an HN comment?

If the opex model doesn't work for an organization, that they perhaps just went above that utilization threshold where it doesn't make sense anymore, and would be a potential 0xide customer?

Re: The Cloud Computer

#853

Post by Always_Anon »

mlindner wrote: post #847
Always_Anon wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they're not unless I'm mistaken. They're not writing the firmware that runs on the NVMe drives, nor the NICs (they're not even writing the drivers for some of the NICs), etc.

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.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#854

Post by wpm »

Fnoord wrote: post #807
novok wrote: post #472

With the rack being so quiet, I wonder if they would ever sell these in smaller versions for more local installations. Would be pretty niche, but it would be interesting. Same kinds of markets that ui.com tries to serve.

Yeah the rack is custom designed to be very quiet. And it was early mentioned in the article. I'm sure they thought it through... but why? Do they want people to store this in their office workspace? It seems like a niche to me? For smaller embedded devices like home appliance and the like, fanless or the option to have low or no fan speed (like modern GPUs) seems to make sense. Because they're stored in the househol…

>That the rack is quiet wasn’t really deliberate (and we are frankly much more interested in the often hidden power draw that blaring fan noise represents).

They optimized for power. That roar of fan noise doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a better job cooling.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#855

Post by keepamovin »

a_imho wrote: post #615
keepamovin wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more about your view that it should not be the norm to provide equal compensation for equal work?

It was a bad edit, it (should not be controversial | should be the norm) to expect equal compensation for equal work. In slightly more detail https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w... https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2022/09/16/the-wage-gap-...

I understand! That's what I suspected, but wasn't sure. I tried understanding it for a minute then thought I'll just ask you! :) haha

Also, thank you for the links. I'll read this because I'm interested in knowing more about thinking behind this. My instinct is in this direction regarding salaries, but I want to develop more clarity. :)

Re: The Cloud Computer

#856

Post by wpm »

steve1977 wrote: post #92
nickik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar in some ways different in others. But in terms of not being a PC architecture. Yes it is. But in many other ways its not at all like a Mainframe.

I’m not sure if “not PC architecture” is really an advantage for many customers.

Someone should tell the investors!

I imagine they are aware that this isn't a solution for many customers. A John Deere tractor makes a poor minivan. This isn't for you. That's fine. It's not for me either. That's ok. I don't need to poo-poo their efforts and sit and moan about how it's not for me.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#857

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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.

I meant the "cloud" components, which typically represent a quasi distributed OS (because real distributed OSes don't exist) and thus are complex to create and maintain. But that's, uh, concerning, that they're also using Illumos. On the one hand, they're guaranteed to understand the system well, because they're probably the only people on the planet who do... On the other hand, makes it harder to hire for, port software to, or later sell the company due to the risk of maintaining such a one-off stack. But Joyent was able to pull off a big exit after almost a decade, so maybe these folks can too.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#858

Post by wpm »

alberth wrote: post #606
abbbi wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, i just wanted to get a feeling what experience it would be using their web console and it seems they still have some limitations in place that have long been solved by other "hyperconverged vm-deploy" players. Want to spin up not only 1 but 20 instances via the console? Nope. Any kind of guest agent in the virtual machine? For direct interop? How is the guest filesystem freezed during snapshot creation? Checkpo…

They have 14-years of catch up to do, to be parity with Nutanix and the likes. Not being negative ... just calling out this is offering is super late to the game.

You are being negative though. You could have phrased that as "they are still new, but I hope they can catch up", which doesn't imply they messed up by being late to the game.

Disruptors never have feature parity to established players in their first offering.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#859

Post by linklocaladdr »

electroly wrote: post #454
skywhopper wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You own this. AWS Outpost is leased and you still also pay for the resource usage on top of the outpost unit itself. And this would not be integrated with your AWS account.

It's mostly not true that you still pay for resource usage on top of the Outpost unit. That's only true, AFAIK, for EBS local snapshots and Route 53 Resolver endpoints. The big boys--EC2 instances, S3 storage, and EBS volumes--are all "free" on Outposts. That is, included in the cost of the unit and not double-charged. Charging for EBS local snapshots on your own Outpost S3 storage and Route 53 Resolvers on your own…

Route 53 on outposts doesn’t charge for your own compute. The outpost resolver is free. The oupost resolver endpoint must be backed by an in-region resolver endpoint, which doesn’t become free just because you own an outpost. What you’re paying for is the ability to sustain high query volume from instances in your VPC to an on-prem DNS server.

Re: The Cloud Computer

#860

Post by bcantrill »

mlindner wrote: post #845
bcantrill wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(The AGESA bootloader -- or ABL -- is in the AMD PSP.) In terms of our replacement for AGESA: the PSP boots to our first instruction, which is the pico host bootloader, phbl[0]. phbl then loads the actual operating system[1], which performs platform enablement as part of booting. (This is pretty involved, but to give you a flavor, see, e.g. initialization of the DXIO engine.[2])

[0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/phbl

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/illumos-gate/tree/stlouis

[2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/illumos-gate/blob/stlouis/u...

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