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Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#91

Post by jmprspret »

filleduchaos wrote: post #64
steveklabnik wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The console is open source, and you can try a demo of it in your browser https://console-preview.oxide.computer/ https://github.com/oxidecomputer/console I also wrote up a blog post walking through me setting up a server by hand: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/using-the-oxide-console You can also use the API, there's a terraform provider, etc.

Poking through Oxide's OSS a few months ago made me want to work with the company so badly. But I am honestly just not (yet) a strong enough candidate - perhaps in a couple of years! In the meantime I will keep rooting around in hubris[0] :) [0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris - fascinating little kernel

I feel very similarly. I have 0 rust experience and 0 Osdev experience but i love unix-like OSes and I am super super interested in what there guys are doing.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#92

Post by kotaKat »

bananapub wrote: post #84
vaylian wrote: post #65

I'm trying to make sense of what this is. I don't get what the unique selling point is. I understand that this is about server hosting. And from context I gather that this is about Rust. It seems that special/custom hardware is involved. And they advocate for buying instead of renting servers. But I can't figure out more than that. Who should be interested in this product? Does it make sense to compare this to AWS, G…

I don't understand why this exact comment is posted on every thread about them - it's not very complicated. "Cloud computing" style systems are nice in some ways - you can just ask a computer to give you some virtual computers and virtual storage and it gives it to you. Whoever owns them can put quotas or pricing or whatever on you, but you can self-serve, and you don't have to care about replacing DIMMs or NVMe stic…

> I really really don't understand what is hard to understand.

I mean, not every single person on HN is a 10x developer that knows 300 programming languages known to man and 45 more known only to catgirls.

I'm a daytime Windows admin, this isn't stuff I normally work with, especially because it's targeted at a specific stack of things that I don't touch.

I really really don't understand what is hard to understand.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#93

Post by panick21_ »

imglorp wrote: post #90
panick21_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OxidePad Laptop product based on Helios with NeWS Window System. When?

I know Don Hopkins hangs out here sometimes, but the big question is did NeWS source code ever get liberated from the depths of Mordoracle?

I don't really know. I was just trying to come up with some obscure references. Solaris on desktop wasn't crazy enough.

I think a modern take on NeWS style system would use Webassembly style system with capability based access rather then PostScript and no security. Basically a modern browser with Canves/WebGL and without a lot of other stuff a browser does.

Would have been a interesting alternative to the Wayland approach.

Kind of sad that Scott McNealy didn't have the balls to open it up. Having some real competition to X in the 90s would have been a cool. Specially if Sun had pushed it at least somewhat.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#94

Post by panick21_ »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #74
nilsherzig wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they sell something like mini and on prem gcp / aws. You just connect the thing to power and ethernet and now you got your own locally running Webinterface / API which can start VMs, networks etc

Oh neat, I can have my own DigitalOcean with one of these?!

Not quite. They don't offer out of the box managed services like DigitalOcean. No one-click MongoDB or stuff like that. No out of the box Kubernetes.

You basically get Networking, Compute and Storage. Everything else you have to build on top.

You will also get stuff like Terraform provider, SDKs and so on.

> I can

I guess if you are millionaire you could.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#95

Post by dns_snek »

rcarmo wrote: post #89
dns_snek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they're vertically integrating everything from hardware to the hypervisor/orchestration layer (something that serves the same function as Kubernetes?) along with their own developer tooling for deploying and managing workloads. edit: And it seems like it's aimed at companies that don't want to pay cloud margins, but don't (yet) have the expertise to set up a production-worthy Kubernetes (or similar) clu…

Why would you think they are limiting themselves to Kubernetes?

I don't, I was just using it as a point of comparison against Oxide's own software stack.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#96

Post by panick21_ »

mise_en_place wrote: post #63
toomuchtodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price delta is out of the box cloud orchestration value (imho). Most large enterprises would struggle to build this themselves (Mesos->OpenShift->Kubernetes/Tanzu/etc), so you’re paying for turnkey cloud on prem. Probably save in the long run considering public cloud margins. Enterprise CIO doesn’t want a hobby project (attempting to cobble together internal cloud orchestration and infra), they want to be able to sho…

I mean…you could also just get a z/VM system and have a few LPARs on it and just use Ansible for orchestration. Why wouldn’t an enterprise CIO just go for a mainframe system?

Getting the same performance and feature out a mainframe will be considerably expensive I would guess. And in addition to that you are buying into an incredibly closed ecosystem where prices only go up from there.

You are also paying for a bunch of stuff you don't need. Most people just don't need to hot swap a CPU or turn these single socket 128 core machines into a gigantic 4096 machine either.

Simply moving virtual machine off and restarting or replacing a sled is enough for the waste majority of use-cases.

This is still pretty much commodity single socket server platforms, just with more sane and open firmware and a sane open source software stack.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#97

Post by panick21_ »

dns_snek wrote: post #73
mise_en_place wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean…you could also just get a z/VM system and have a few LPARs on it and just use Ansible for orchestration. Why wouldn’t an enterprise CIO just go for a mainframe system?

"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, I'm not the target customer base for one of these, but if they can deliver a server rack that teams can plug in, turn on, and start deploying workloads to it in the same way they currently deploy to public clouds with familiar tooling, that seems extremely valuable to me. It's going to depend on how well they manage to pull off the magic trick of "little or no configuratio…

If there is one company that has made 'make it easy to debugging issues' their core philosophy, its them.

Its almost all open software, that helps a lot. They add a minimal amount firmware, rather then the many, many million lines of firmware that is usually around. And most of the stuff they added is Rust on a micro-kernel. (Check out the talk I linked top level to see some of their low-level debugging infrastructure).

To bad they can't (yet) get open firmware in the NIC, the SSDs and some of those other places (Time for an Oxide like company that makes P4 driven NICs). But nobody else can really offer that either.

The only real issue for them is that Illumos is the host OS. Its open source and stable of course, and has good debugging tools. But in terms of industry experience, the amount of people with deep knowlage of the system are harder to find compared to Linux.

The of course also add some complex software on top that will have to work properly, moving VMs, distributed storage and so on.

Full DIY is pretty damn hard, you need a serious team to pull that off. The Dell VxRail/VMWare is the more reasonable competition. I think VMWare going full Broadcom mode will make them more interesting. Buying into that ecosystem isn't that appealing right now.

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#98

Post by panick21_ »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #77
1123581321 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t Oxide also negotiate pricing?

And they keep the margin to have money for R&D. I kind of get it because it’s low volume for now but I don’t necessarily see the appeal of being an early adopter here.

The appeal is that your a buying into an open infrastructure system, rather then closed firmware and VMWare (now owned by ... Broadcom).

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#99

Post by Havoc »

dns_snek wrote: post #78
Havoc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a company buying an out of the box k8s because they’re not able to set it up themselves sounds insane to me. What’s the plan when it breaks? Send the server back?

I imagine the expectation is that the company obviously needs to know how to perform regular hardware maintenance, but the hypervisor/orchestration layer should be so well integrated that it doesn't require an expert team to operate (like you would need with a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, which is notoriously difficult to understand and operate in production). If that illusion breaks and you need to get into the w…

> self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, which is notoriously difficult to understand and operate in production).

Yeah that was my reference point - cluster at home. Breaks often & hard and usually end up wiping it. Good for home use but I’d not want to rely on it for prod

Re: Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

#100

Post by fulafel »

bananapub wrote: post #84
vaylian wrote: post #65

I'm trying to make sense of what this is. I don't get what the unique selling point is. I understand that this is about server hosting. And from context I gather that this is about Rust. It seems that special/custom hardware is involved. And they advocate for buying instead of renting servers. But I can't figure out more than that. Who should be interested in this product? Does it make sense to compare this to AWS, G…

I don't understand why this exact comment is posted on every thread about them - it's not very complicated. "Cloud computing" style systems are nice in some ways - you can just ask a computer to give you some virtual computers and virtual storage and it gives it to you. Whoever owns them can put quotas or pricing or whatever on you, but you can self-serve, and you don't have to care about replacing DIMMs or NVMe stic…

Cloud is a nebulous term (intended), it can mean many things (SaaS? IaaS? PaaS?) and of course your own cloud is a self-contradictory term to boot so leaves you wondering what parts will be different and how. It might not be complicated but it's not easy to communicate if you start with that word.
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