[HN Gopher] The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [...
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The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]
Author : tosh
Score : 70 points
Date : 2020-07-28 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| guerrilla wrote:
| > While our software systems have become increasingly elastic,
| the physical substrate available to run that software (that is,
| the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC
| architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since
| figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose --
| but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this
| talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale,
| server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open
| firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing
| that vision.
| justicezyx wrote:
| This is a bland PR oriented statement. I was roughly expecting
| this level of details from the speaker.
|
| The one statement feels rather bland: "those advances have been
| denied to the mass market"
|
| What does this mean?
|
| It was not denied, they were just too complex for mass market.
| People are happy to pay AWS so that they can worry not the
| machines, and write JS code from day one.
| bcantrill wrote:
| No, they've been denied: I elaborate on this in the talk, but
| if you look at (say) an OCP-based system (e.g., Facebook's
| Tioga Pass[1]), the innovations in that system are simply not
| available for any price to the enterprise buyer. And yes,
| those buyers emphatically _do_ exist -- and no, they are
| certainly not everyone deploying on elastic infrastructure.
|
| [1] https://www.opencompute.org/documents/facebook-2s-server-
| tio...
| justicezyx wrote:
| There was always a need of making something commercially
| successful. But there needs to be proportional demand to
| justify.
|
| OCP cannot produce their products to mass market unless
| there is a strong demand. Certainly it looks like market
| mainstream is not too passionate about building or managing
| their machines.
|
| I don't deny that some people, in any circumstances, would
| demand different offerings from the market mainstream.
|
| And I am totally understanding why such statement like "a
| was denied to b" was used here.
|
| I was merely stating, for mass market, there is no serious
| demand for what's claimed to be denied from them. And I am
| stating that from a more technical perspective nor a
| marketing or PR one. (And I am very positive about the
| necessity of marketing and PR)
| wmf wrote:
| In the current modular[1] structure of the industry where
| the server is a product and the network is a separate
| product and the hypervisor is yet another product etc,
| there's no demand for components that aren't compatible
| with the morass of existing standards. So yeah, there
| isn't enough demand for OCP servers and such.
|
| It sounds like Oxide is trying to break out of that by
| providing the whole stack.
|
| [1] https://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-
| wrong/
| kaliszad wrote:
| There are so many old (and frankly even new) line of
| business applications, where the developers haven't
| considered among other things laws of physics like speed
| of light in optical fiber much. These systems
| (client+server applications) tend to run much better on
| premise. The applications are often not automated much,
| aren't really secured that well (so you would probably
| need a VPN to the cloud to run it safely) and the
| bandwidth of internet connections at some of these
| companies are not really suitable for clients on premise
| and servers in the cloud anyway. You are lucky, if the
| synchronization to a different location works well
| enough.
|
| Also, cloud is very costly if you don't use the up and
| especially down scaling because your application/
| infrastructure wasn't really designed for that. Also if
| you buy some new machine for the factory it usually comes
| with software (usually MS Windows Server + MS SQL Server
| + some machine control software) that has hardware
| requirements that don't really fit well with cloud
| pricing. Such machines tend to run for decades and the
| company certainly hasn't thought about being efficient
| with computing resources on the server. On premise
| hardware isn't that costly if you consider these factors,
| if the supplier cannot secure the machine properly, you
| slap it into its own VLAN and write an ACL for the RDP
| access (because that is how it is) and are done with it.
| Basically dedicated Gigabit speed with very little
| latency for any communication between the clients and the
| server. Remember, you are almost lucky if a Windows
| Update doesn't break the software/ software license on
| the server or the client...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| That's a 109 page PDF. If the innovations are listed in
| that PDF, they are not leaping out at me while skimming it.
|
| Googling "tioga pass server" brings up
| https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/the-
| end-t... which says nothing and
| https://www.mitacmct.com/OCPserver_E7278_E7278-S who seem
| to be selling them.
|
| Tioga pass appears to be a small dual-socket server. How is
| it different from a typical dual-socket blade server?
| kaliszad wrote:
| For me as a systems engineer and systems administrator
| appliances like VMware VxRail are totally infuriating at
| times. Especially the deeply object oriented design of
| their APIs that really hinders you implementing anything
| not already present in Ansible or Terraform in a reasonable
| amount of time yourself. I could fill a talk ranting. They
| really should take a hint from Rich Hickey and stuff like
| "Simple made easy" even if they don't write any Clojure at
| all.
|
| In the end, the less sophisticated Citrix XenServer we use
| now for about 10 years seems to be more hackable in some
| ways.
| jamwt wrote:
| > People are happy to pay AWS
|
| Many of them are not.
|
| We have serious vendor lock-in now, where a very few
| companies are gatekeepers to almost any business that runs on
| the internet.
|
| And their margins are _enormous_ on this business. It ends up
| costing much, much more to pay them to run our machines for
| us.
|
| And increasingly, the expertise to do this is being
| consolidated in these companies, so the talent available to
| pursue any other way is diminishing as new grads never learn
| about the magic places their code runs.
|
| The _reliability_ outcomes are nearly the same, despite the
| deferral to their expertise.
|
| Labor savings b/c you don't to learn about provisioning your
| own machines? Not much. AWS is so sophisticated you need to
| develop a nearly equivalent amount of (non-portable)
| expertise to actually operate it well. Remember, the
| alternative isn't just rack your own, it's... dedicated
| hosting! And lots of other options with less lock-in and more
| standards.
|
| It's sort of frightening how complicit the broader technology
| industry is in this power consolidation.
| justicezyx wrote:
| You beat vendor lock in by standardization.
|
| Vendors refuses to take part in standardization if they
| absolutely have the leverage.
|
| Remember Amazon's reluctance in joining the CNCF and
| container groups?
|
| By stating you are not happy, Amazon is perfectly ready to
| do what ever they can to please you, ad stated in their
| "customer obsession" (and I assure that that statement is
| as sincere as any human stating any commitment).
|
| But back to the point, people in mass market primarily are
| no longer interested in managing machines, let alone
| building themselves.
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| Would someone like to tl;dr? I can't tell whether I want to watch
| this 1h26m video based on its vague title.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| The title is a reference to Tracy Kidder's book:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
| steveklabnik wrote:
| This is probably the most thorough public explanation of what
| we're doing over at Oxide.
| rudedogg wrote:
| When you posted about joining Oxide I couldn't quite figure out
| what they (now you) do by looking at the homepage. I stumbled
| across this other lecture (https://youtu.be/3LVeEjsn8Ts?t=2189)
| that is along the same line of thinking, and it started to make
| sense.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Thanks, I'll have to check this out!
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Got a TL;DW for us? Video is 86 minutes long.
| kaliszad wrote:
| Basically they want to build rack scale computers with open/
| auditable firmware all the way down and really design the
| hardware for "hyper-scale" like computing. That means, no
| VGA/ USB/ DVD on the server, power and networking will
| probably be solved for more servers at once, there will be
| APIs for all of the low level stuff that is probably
| inconsistent with your typical Dells, HPEs, Lenovos,
| SuperMicros.
|
| I find, Bryan Cantrill talks are generally worth it to watch
| even just for entertainment if for nothing else.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I used to love listening to him, really.. (still remember
| his dtrace talk fondly) but this one was hard to focus on.
| Lots of uh ah hum. Surprising.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The sibling comment is good.
|
| The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out
| on this slide: https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?list=PLoROMvodv4r
| MWw6rRoeSpkise...
|
| The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy
| any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to.
|
| The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the
| problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors
| today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.
| kaliszad wrote:
| Good luck/ "kick ass and have fun" while pushing computing
| forward. I applaud the effort to make the very foundations of
| computing more robust and introspectable. The most laudable
| goal seems to me to be especially the general accessibility of
| some of these achievements in the long run even to non-
| customers. Maybe, open and robust firmware will become the
| standard. Please also embrace IPv6 to prevent taking all the
| brokenness in that area (e.g. network boot, remote management)
| for the ride into the 21. century.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Thank you! It has been a lot of fun so far. My colleagues are
| some of the smartest, most helpful people I've ever worked
| with. I look forward to that future too :)
| kaliszad wrote:
| We will evaluate the next hardware generation at our
| company probably sometime in 2022-2023. I sure would love
| to get my hands on an Oxide computer :-) though I fear we
| are more in the 3-10x 2U rack computer area for most
| locations. This is probably the sizing for most businesses
| in middle Europe, e.g. Germany.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| This is a great talk! I have to admit my first thought wasn't
| to the data center. Which is obviously the predominant global
| energy waste. But to the "local" problem of green compute for
| IoT / drones / autonomous systems. What's the state of the art
| in OS dvelopment for high efficiency embedded hardware such as
| Contiki, Tiny OS, RIOT, Zypher, Mbed and Brillo? And what are
| the major insights that are missing?
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(page generated 2020-07-28 23:00 UTC)