[HN Gopher] The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shi...
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The first Oxide rack being prepared for customer shipment
Author : jclulow
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-07-01 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hachyderm.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (hachyderm.io)
| vira28 wrote:
| Super excited to see more companies owning hardware vs renting
| (aka cloud).
|
| Somewhat related if you are interested on companies which heavily
| uses on-Prem check out
|
| https://github.com/viggy28/awesome-onprem
| pkaye wrote:
| What operating system do they use?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| A modern rack contains many computers. We use both our own lil
| embedded OS, Hubris, as well as our own illumos distribution
| named Helios.
|
| None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though. You
| run VMs with whatever you want.
| mindentropy wrote:
| Pardon my knowledge but isn't this the same as what is being
| done on the IBM Z Mainframe?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| In some sense, but not in others. This is an x86 box.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| Why is this better than a normal k8's distribution or just
| buying vm's from Amazon for someone who doesn't need high
| security or other boutique features?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It may be, it may not be! The main differential in those
| cases is that you're not owning the hardware, you're
| renting it. That is very important for some people, and not
| so much for others. It depends on what you're doing.
| slavapestov wrote:
| Why do you use Illumos?
| count wrote:
| A sizable portion of their team and leadership is former
| Sun / Solaris / Illumos dev folks. It's their 'native'
| OS/platform.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Many people at Oxide have been working with it and its
| predecessors for an extremely long time. It is a platform
| that is very well known to us.
| xorcist wrote:
| I truly and honestly hope you succeed. I know for certain
| that the market for on-prem will remain large for certain
| sectors for the forseeable future.
|
| However. The kind of customer who spends this type of
| money can be conservative. They already have to go with
| on an unknown vendor, and rely on unknown hardware. Then
| they end up with a hypervisor virtually no one else in
| the same market segment uses.
|
| Would you say that KVM or ESXi would be an easier or
| harder sell here?
|
| Innovation budget can be a useful concept. And I'm afraid
| it's being stretched a lot.
| [deleted]
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > None of this is exposed directly to the customer, though
|
| What about security updates and bug fixes? No platform is
| perfect, after all...
|
| Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5 years
| down the line... would the hardware be repurposeable? Or
| would it just become a large paperweight?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > What about security updates and bug fixes?
|
| Security is an important part of the product. You'll get
| updates.
|
| > Or what about if (god forbid), you go out of business 5
| years down the line
|
| All of the software, to the degree that we are able to, is
| open source. This is important precisely because you own
| the hardware; you as a customer deserve to know what we put
| on it.
| greyface- wrote:
| Who's the lucky customer?
| TOGoS wrote:
| Anyone want to explain what the heck Oxide is? Based on the
| comments it sounds like a biodegradable plastic wrap?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I wrote this a while back, does that help? Happy to elaborate.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
| rvz wrote:
| As long as it encourages on-premise self-hosting, this can only
| be a good thing.
| Devasta wrote:
| I'm convinced that if anything is going to reverse the migration
| to the cloud, it's Oxide.
|
| Is there anything in the works for using some of this in a
| homelab? Mainframes (unofficially) have Hercules, be good to see
| something similar for folks who want to experiment.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding the product but wouldn't hypervisor
| do the same thing for homelab related stuff? You'll have to
| provide your own hardware but shouldn't be that difficult.
| lwhalen wrote:
| Is there a public price list anywhere?
| atdrummond wrote:
| What really put me off of them (and as a fan of BCantrill and
| others there) is this information is highly obfuscated and I
| was never reached out to the two times I contacted Oxide to
| find out more info (both times on behalf of an org that could
| more than pay).
|
| Still think they'll succeed big but I don't think they've fully
| dialed in what is important to people who may be able to pull
| the trigger on a decision like this.
| bcantrill wrote:
| With our apologies, we can't seem to find anything based on
| either your HN username or the e-mail address in your
| profile. So sorry that it was somehow dropped or otherwise
| went into the ether! Would you mind mailing either me (my
| first name at oxidecomputer.com) or sales@oxidecomputer.com?
| Thanks for your interest (and fandom!) and apologies again!
| dijit wrote:
| Second this, I was (and am) in a position to pay
| substantially for such a system and the few times I reached
| out was met with radio silence.
|
| possibly because I am in Europe and they want to focus on the
| NA market, not sure.
| bcantrill wrote:
| It is true that we are focusing on the North American
| market, but we are also not trying to treat the European
| market with radio silence; please accept our apologies! We
| can't find anything under your HN username or the
| information in your HN profile; would you mind mailing
| either me (my first name at oxidecomputer.com) or
| sales@oxidecomputer.com? With our thanks -- and apologies
| again!
| dijit wrote:
| I will definitely reach out. likely you have me under
| jmh@sharkmob.com which was my corporate email address at
| the time. Alas, I have moved on from that job. But just
| so you know I am not lying.
| samcat116 wrote:
| This is super cool. I realize a lot of HN folks might not see the
| point of this, but it literally saves an entire team of people
| for companies.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Am I standing this correctly? This is a on premise drop in
| replacement for your cloud service like AWS?
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Not unless you have strictly constrained yourself to using
| vanilla VMs and nothing else.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| From a commodity hardware perspective I'm not sure there is much
| to be excited about but if it's a meaningful better and cost
| competitive IaaS maybe that is exciting. Also you are probably
| going to want GPU support which may be hard with their super
| customized offering.
|
| If I were to do a bare metal deployment I'd look at kubernetes +
| kubevirt + a software defined storage provider. Then you get a
| common orchestration layer for VMs, containers, or other
| distribute workloads (ML training/inference) but don't need to
| pay the Vmware Tax and you'd be using a common enough primitive
| that you can move workloads around to 'burst' to the cheapest
| cloud as needed.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Oxide has been discussed on HN a bunch over the last 3+ years
| (e.g., [0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]), and while nothing is without
| its detractors, we have found on balance this community to be
| extraordinarily supportive of our outlandishly ambitious project
| -- thank you!
|
| [0] When we started:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360
|
| [1] On the Changelog podcast:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32037207
|
| [2] On our embedded Rust OS, Hubris:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29468969
|
| [3] On running Hubris on the PineTime:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30828884
|
| [4] On compliance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730337
|
| [5] On our approach to rack-scale networking:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976444
|
| [6] On our _de novo_ hypervisor, Propolis:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30671447
|
| [7] On our boot model (and the elimination of the BIOS):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33145411
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Wishing you best of luck.
|
| Really curious to see if in 2023, Engineered Systems still have
| a market in this world of commodity cloud hardware.
| zengid wrote:
| I highly recommend folks check out the Oxide and Friends calls
| on discord, usually on Mondays 5pm PST. More info:
| https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends
|
| Disclaimer: I am a fan, not affiliated.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Can you share how software engineers can bring hardware to
| market? Fabrication, logistics, manufacturing. What should be
| outsourced? Who did you partner with for what?
|
| Also, congrats.
| wmf wrote:
| They have discussed that on their podcast:
| https://www.youtube.com/@oxidecomputercompany4540
| elishah wrote:
| > Oxide has been discussed on HN a bunch over the last 3+ years
| ...
|
| While I don't disbelieve you, I'm sure that I am not the only
| one who has never heard of this before now.
|
| And I'd like to suggest that for such people, half a dozen
| links to extremely granular implementation details of one tiny
| facet are a lot less useful than a brief description of, like,
| what this actually _is._
| doublerebel wrote:
| Please don't encourage lazyweb. Plus, this is already being
| discussed downthread.
| CalChris wrote:
| Hubris, Humility and Propolis are open source. Is anyone else
| using them?
| throw0101a wrote:
| Be the outlandish you wish to see in the world. -- Not Gandhi
| bch wrote:
| The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the
| unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to
| himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable
| man.
|
| -George Bernard Shaw
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| The world is an impersonal euphemism for human culture. All
| things apart from physics and human nature are dentable.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Congrats to the entire team. Being a wayward hardware guy
| somewhere in telcomland that has followed your progress
| throughout the years (and having listened to pretty much every
| oxide podcast), I am genuinely happy for you all.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| So they reinvented the mainframe with a prettier exterior?
|
| Their own OS: Check Big tall box: Check Expensive: Check (well no
| price list i have seen so far) Proprietary hardware at least
| interfaces. (?) upgrades must be bought from the vendor (?)
|
| Right to repair?
| crote wrote:
| Not quite. A traditional mainframe is highly integrated, to the
| point of allowing hotswapping of CPU and memory. Oxide seems to
| be a fairly standard collection of x64 hardware, with a
| proprietary management software sauce.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Just to expand slightly, "proprietary" in the sense of "built
| by us for this computer," but _not_ in the way that free or
| open source software developers speak of the word
| "proprietary," the vast majority of what we do is MPL
| licensed, to the degree that it is actually possbile.
| jclulow wrote:
| One of our core product goals is to actually allow relatively
| hot swapping of individual compute sleds. It's true that each
| sled is an x86 server, but there's control software managing
| the whole rack as a unit, with live migration of workloads
| and replicated storage. The architecture of the whole thing
| leans towards treating sleds as essentially like CPU and
| memory (and storage) boards in previous generations of large
| scale computers like mainframes.
| wmf wrote:
| It's more like reinventing Sun with an uglier exterior but yes.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Anyone willing to disclose minimum pricing? Are we talking tens
| of thousands? Hundreds? I hate when people say, 'If you have to
| ask, you can't afford it.' Please don't be that guy.
| wmf wrote:
| Based on the components I'm guessing a half million.
| shrubble wrote:
| 32x EPYC servers, figure $10K/server on a base config =
| $320,000 .
|
| Add in what appears to be, 2x 100Gb Ethernet switches, the
| 100Gbps NICs, cabling, other rack hardware; service processors
| that allow you to control the servers, whatever amount of NVME
| drives, etc. Assembly, burn in, test etc.
|
| My guess is that a base config would be somewhere between $400K
| to $500K but could very definitely go up from there for a
| completely "loaded" config.
| [deleted]
| brucepink wrote:
| If you compare an 0xide rack with a standard combo of Dl380s,
| Nexus switches, netapp filers and Vmware licences, and look at
| the specs page - " 1024TB of raw storage in NVMe" - there's no
| way this is tens of thousands and I'd be a bit surprised if it
| was in the hundreds either.
| sgt wrote:
| You're saying this rack might cost a million dollars?
| dijit wrote:
| a half rack netapp filer can be a half-million dollars by
| itself.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I'd say there's certainly a chance based on the specs being
| quoted. If we do some very rough back-of-napkin math and
| figure enterprise grade NVMe storage is something like $100
| per TB, that's plausibly $100k on storage drives alone
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I didn't understand the business opportunity of Oxide at all.
| Didn't make sense to me.
|
| However if they're aiming at the companies parachuting out of the
| cloud back to data centers and on prem then it makes a lot of
| sense.
|
| It's possible that the price comparison is not with comparable
| computing devices, but simply with the 9 cents per gigabyte
| egress fee from the major clouds.
|
| If I was marketing director at Oxide I'd focus all messaging on
| "9 cents".
| fbdab103 wrote:
| They sell servers, what does not make sense about it? You can
| argue about the specific niche (big enough to run their own
| hardware, too small to design their own), but companies need
| somewhere to do compute. If nothing else, I love their approach
| to rethinking all of the individual software components in the
| stack and tossing those things which do not make sense in the
| modern era.
| crote wrote:
| They seem to sell _one set_ of servers, that 's the part that
| doesn't make sense.
|
| Where is this magical company that needs exactly one rack of
| exactly one type of server? The _vast_ majority of companies
| needing this much compute will also be interested in storage
| servers, servers filled with GPUs, special high-RAM nodes,
| etc. And at that point you 'll also be using some kind of
| router for proper connectivity.
|
| Why bother going for a proprietary solution from an unproven
| company for the regular compute nodes, and forcing yourself
| to overcommit by buying it per rack? Why not just get them
| from proven vendors?
| manicennui wrote:
| Because the "proven" vendors suck?
| wmf wrote:
| Everybody has to start somewhere. I remember when EC2 only
| had one kind of VM.
| hhh wrote:
| I work for a manufacturing company that needs exactly two
| types of boxes, generic compute without storage that
| connects to a SAN, and GPU based servers.
| bri3d wrote:
| My take: Oxide is for companies who want to buy compute,
| not computers.
|
| They take the idea of "hyperconvergence" - building a
| software platform that's tightly integrated and abstracts
| away the Hard Parts of building a big virtualized compute
| infrastructure, and "hyperscaling" - building a hardware
| platform that's more than the sum of its parts, thanks to
| the idea of being able to design cooling, power, etc. at a
| rack scale rather than a computer scale. Then they combine
| these into a compute-as-a-unit product.
|
| I, too, am a bit skeptical. I think that they will
| absolutely have the "hyperconvergence" side nailed given
| their background and goals, but selling an entire rack-at-
| a-time solution at the same time will be hard. But I have
| high hopes for them as it seems like a very interesting
| idea.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| The question isn't whether anyone fits into that niche, but
| why anyone who does would buy this over a plain old off-the-
| shelf system.
| osti wrote:
| Does oxide provide some sort of management software like
| openstack on top of the hardware?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You interact through the rack via an API, yes. I hesitate to
| say "like openstack" because these sorts of systems are huge,
| complicated, and what "like" means depends on you know, what
| you use. But you do get management software, yes.
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| That's everything they do I do believe.
| isatty wrote:
| [flagged]
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Servers with high quality software integration. These provide the
| same value to businesses as Apple devices provide to consumers.
| Hopefully they "just work" and eliminate a bunch of Devops
| distractions.
|
| Most hardware companies have terrible software. If Oxide can
| handle manufacturing and logistics, then they'll be huge in about
| 10 years.
| tpurves wrote:
| It looks cool, what primary problem does it solve vs AWS?
| pizza wrote:
| Ownership and control vs rent and managed setup
| mbStavola wrote:
| Congrats to the Oxide team, this is a massive achievement.
|
| Now that racks are shipping it'd be awesome to see a top-to-
| bottom look at the hardware and software. They've given a lot of
| behind the scenes peeks at what they're doing via the Oxide and
| Friends podcast, but as far as I'm aware there is no public
| information on what it all looks like together.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Oxide is such an ambitious project, I am such a fan of the
| aesthetic and design and of course transparency of all of the
| cool people that work there.
|
| I'd love to have a rack or two some day!
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I believe that good hardware and software unified into one neat
| package can steal customers back from the cloud. Especially in
| the current economic conditions where everyone's looking to save
| on their server bills. I hope to some day work with Oxide stuff.
| anaisbetts wrote:
| Congrats to the team, but after hearing about Oxide for literal
| years since the beginning of the company and repeatedly reading
| different iterations of their landing page, I still don't know
| what their product actually _is_. It 's a hypervisor host? Maybe?
| So I can host VMs on it? And a network switch? So I can....switch
| stuff?
| 71a54xd wrote:
| It's like an on prem AWS for devs. I don't understand the use
| case but the hardware is cool.
| electroly wrote:
| It's AWS Outposts Rack without the AWS connection. That is, you
| get a turnkey rack with the servers, networking, hypervisor,
| and support software preconfigured. You plug it into power and
| network and it's ready to run your VMs.
|
| Outposts, too, started with a full-rack configuration only, but
| they eventually introduced an individual server configuration
| as well. It'll be interesting to see if Oxide eventually
| decides to serve the smaller market that doesn't have the scale
| for whole-rack-at-a-time.
| shrubble wrote:
| It is a rack of servers, but, every aspect of it is supposed to
| be engineered to include the full list of things that are
| needed to make a rack of servers a useful VM hosting setup. So
| it includes the networking, connection to the service
| processors which allow you to remotely access each server,
| other management things, etc.
|
| Once installed, you plug in the network connection(s) and add
| power, then boot up. Then you can add your VMs and start
| running them.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I wrote this a while back, does that help? Happy to elaborate.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
| wcerfgba wrote:
| I don't really understand how having a larger minimum
| purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP. Your
| comments explain the emphasis on tighter integration across
| the stack, but it doesn't clearly show why this is a benefit.
|
| What are the problems people are having with existing systems
| (like Vxrail), and how does Oxide fix those? What stories are
| you hearing?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I don 't really understand how having a larger minimum
| purchase unit (entire rack vs rack unit) is a USP._
|
| For some organizations cattle-like pizza boxes or chassis
| with blade systems are still not cattle-like enough. By
| making the management unit the entire rack you can reduce
| overhead (at least compared to a rack of individual
| servers, even if they are treated like cattle).
|
| There are vendors that will drop ship entire (multiple)
| racks pre-wired and pre-configured for various scenarios
| (especially HPC): just provide power, (water) cooling, and
| a network uplink.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I wouldn't say that a larger purchase unit is a USP; it is
| an underlying reason why other USPs are able to be
| delivered. This is an engineering focused place, so I
| tended to focus on the engineering aspects.
|
| My sibling commentor just left a great answer to your
| second question, so I'll leave that one there :)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Seems like Oxide is aiming to be the Apple of the enterprise
| hardware (which isn't too surprising given the background of
| the people involved - Sun used to be something like that as
| were other fully-integrated providers, though granted that
| Sun didn't write Unix from scratch). Almost like coming to a
| full circle from the days where the hardware and the software
| was all done in an integrated fashion before Linux turned-up
| and started to run on your toaster.
|
| From your referenced comment:
|
| > The rack isn't built in such a way that you can just pull
| out a sled and shove it into another rack; the whole thing is
| built in a cohesive way.
|
| > other vendors will sell you a rack, but it's made up of 1U
| or 2U servers, not designed as a cohesive whole, but as a
| collection of individual parts
|
| What I'm curious about is how analogous or different is this
| cohesiveness to the days where vendors built the complete
| system? Is that the main selling point or there are nuances
| to it?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Apple or Sun are common comparisons, yes :)
|
| > What I'm curious about is how analogous or different is
| this cohesiveness to the days where vendors built the
| complete system?
|
| To be honest, that was before my personal time. I was a kid
| in that era, using ultra hand-me-down hardware. I'd
| speculate that one large difference is that hardware was
| much, much simpler back then.
| bcantrill wrote:
| The holistic design is certainly a big piece of it. While
| we certainly admire aspects of both Apple and Sun (and we
| count formerly-Apple and formerly-Sun among our employees),
| we would also differentiate ourselves from both companies
| in critical dimensions:
|
| - Oxide is entirely open where Apple is extraordinarily
| secretive: all of our software (including the software at
| the lowest layers of the stack!) is open source, and we
| encourage Oxide employees to talk publicly about their
| work.
|
| - Oxide is taking a systems approach where Sun sold silo'd
| components: I have written about this before[0], but Sun
| struggled to really build whole systems. For Oxide, we have
| made an entire rack-level system that includes both
| hardware _and_ software: the abstraction to the operator is
| as turn-key elastic infrastructure rather than as a kit
| car.
|
| We have tried to take the best of both companies (and for
| that matter, the best of all the companies we have worked)
| to deliver what customers want: a holistic system to deploy
| and operate on-premises infrastructure.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
| jjav wrote:
| Oxide is the only exciting and refreshing technology
| product company I know of today. I've been rooting from
| the sidelines for years now, I want Oxide to succeed
| wildly so I can hopefully be a customer at some point.
| anaisbetts wrote:
| Perfect - now get that 2nd paragraph on the landing page
| somehow!
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| For those not in the know, this is what is being talked about[1].
| Congrats to the Oxide team!
|
| Would love to know what kind of uses this is being put to. In
| this age, everyone only talks about the cloud, with its roach
| motel model and all.
|
| [1] https://oxide.computer
| api wrote:
| The demise of on premise and private data centers is greatly
| exaggerated. Few people here do that because the cloud is great
| for startups and rapid prototyping. Most on prem beyond small
| scale is big established companies.
|
| There is a minor trend of established companies reconsidering
| cloud because it turns out it doesn't really save money if your
| work load is well understood and not highly elastic. In fact
| cloud is often far more expensive.
| CharlesW wrote:
| FYI for language pedants like me: It's "on-premises" or "on-
| prem". A "premise" is something assumed to be true.
| dataangel wrote:
| Somebody help me understand the business value. All the tech is
| cool but I don't get the business model, it seems deeply
| impractical.
|
| * You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most
| people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it
| seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud.
|
| * Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud,
| all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs
| nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high
| cost to switch.
|
| * AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds,
| which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide.
| So even higher cost to switch.
|
| * Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run
| everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you
| would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this?
| Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is
| for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering
| questionable value here.
|
| * Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort
| into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not
| making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am
| skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not
| noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups.
|
| So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants
| their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate
| out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they
| manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't
| need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever
| off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of
| the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for
| the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on
| prem, the CIA is on AWS now.
|
| I don't get it, it just seems like a bunch of geeks playing with
| VC money?
| oldtownroad wrote:
| Part of the appeal of the cloud over on-premise is that on-
| premise is not just expensive, but hard: oxide's product isn't
| just on-premise hardware, it's on-premise hardware _that is
| easy_*. If on-premise was just expensive, it would be so much
| more appealing -- because the cloud is expensive too!
|
| Most every software engineer has worked in an org where
| spending six figures per month on AWS or GCP is totally normal
| and acceptable because the alternative, buying hardware, is
| this awful scary unknown that could be cheaper but could also
| blow the entire company up. If oxide can solve that, suddenly
| on-premise becomes much more attractive.
|
| Yes, people are hooked on the cloud, but not because of data
| transfer... because it's easy.
|
| * well, the first few deployments might not be easy but that's
| true of anything new.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| 100% agree with you
|
| Also, what this person said :)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552245
| dcre wrote:
| It is simply false that everything has gone cloud. The whole
| argument falls down on the first premise. Also nearly everyone
| who owns their own servers still runs VMs on them.
| elishah wrote:
| > Also nearly everyone who owns their own servers still runs
| VMs on them.
|
| This strikes me as at _least_ as much of a leap as
| "everything has gone cloud."
|
| Containers are... kind of a thing. And while there certainly
| are use cases for VMs over containers, they're comparatively
| niche.
|
| This product seems as if it'd be a better fit for every real
| use case I've ever seen if it were a prebuilt kubernetes
| cluster rather than a prebuilt VM hypervisor.
| closeparen wrote:
| That's a Silicon Valley bubble perspective. Everything from
| your kid's school to your car dealer to your automaker is
| VMWare.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Bandcamp is doing just the opposite and leaving the cloud, in
| fact: https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-
| cloud-654b47...
| packetslave wrote:
| Basecamp (DHH) not Bandcamp (Derek Sivers)
| dataangel wrote:
| In 15 years of professional experience I've never worked at a
| place that uses VMs on the servers they own. They're just
| going to run Linux off an image so what's the point? You
| might want to look outside your niche.
| [deleted]
| dijit wrote:
| Is this true? I have honestly never worked in any company
| >50 people that didnt use VMs on owned hardware.
|
| IT departments typically love VMs (and vmware)- AD machines
| are most often hosted on VMs on VMWare.
| tw04 wrote:
| >* You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what
| most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this,
| but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone
| cloud.
|
| This is very much not true and seems to be a result of people
| in the valley thinking the rest of the world operates like the
| valley. In the rest of the world I've found mature businesses
| that bought into the "cloud is the best" quickly started doing
| the math on their billing rate and realized there is a VERY
| small subset of their business that has any reason to be in the
| cloud. Actually one of the very best use-cases of public cloud
| I've seen is a finance firm that sticks new products into the
| cloud until they hit maturity so they can properly right-size
| the on-prem permanent home for them. And if those products
| never take off, they just move on to the next one. They're
| willing to pay a premium for 12-18 months because they can
| justify it financially.
|
| >* Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the
| cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it
| costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So
| high cost to switch.
|
| And yet company's do it all the time. I think you'll again find
| mature fortune 500s can do the math on the exit cost vs.
| staying cost and quickly justify leaving in a reasonable time
| window.
|
| >* AWS and others provide tons of other services in their
| clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top
| of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch.
|
| And as you've seen plenty of people here point out: most of
| those services tend to be overrated. OK, so you've got database
| as a service: except now you can't actually tune it to your
| specific workload. And $/query, even ignoring performance, is
| astronomically higher than building your own and paying a DBA
| to manage it unless you're a 2-man startup.
|
| >* Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to
| run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues
| you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is
| this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris)
| which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and
| delivering questionable value here.
|
| I don't know of a single enterprise that has run anything BUT
| VMs for the last decade. Other than Mainframe (which you can
| argue is actually just VMs in a different name), and some HFT-
| type applications that need the lowest possible latency at all
| costs, it's all virtualized. As for Illumos: why do you care?
| Oxide is supporting and maintaining it as an appliance. Tape
| has been "dead" for 2 decades. FreeBSD has been "dead" since
| the early 2000s. It's only dead for people that don't deal with
| enterprise IT.
|
| >* Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of
| effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're
| not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc).
| I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have
| not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups.
|
| I have no doubt they've done their research, and I can tell you
| from my industry experience there is a large cross-section of
| people who want an easy button. There's a reason why companys
| like Nutanix exist and have the market cap they do - but they
| could never actually get the whole way there because they got
| wrapped up in the "everything is software defined!!!". Which
| works really well until you realize that you're left to your
| own devices on networking.
|
| >So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who
| wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to
| migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever
| hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a
| time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to
| put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going
| to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT
| is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the
| poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now.
|
| I mean no disrespect but I get the impression you haven't ever
| worked with a fortune 500 that's outside of the valley. This is
| EXACTLY what they all want. They aren't going to run their
| entire datacenter on this, but when the datacenter is measured
| in hundreds to thousands of servers, they've got plenty of
| workloads that it's a perfect fit for
| nighmi wrote:
| > they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris)
|
| This is an amazing plus in my eyes. Solaris systems are
| amazing.
| [deleted]
| qingcharles wrote:
| Many companies are leaving cloud hosting due to spiraling
| costs. Even well-knowns like 37signals:
|
| https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb
|
| It's nice to have options. Cloud good. Self-hosting good.
| Middle options good.
| rzzzt wrote:
| My mind also jumped to this post. But can you name another
| company that did so recently?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Cloud was a low interest rate phenomena. I predict a return to
| metal servers and managed data centers.
| bcantrill wrote:
| I'm not sure what "weird EE side quests" you're referring to,
| but anyone interested in learning what we've done in terms of
| hardware should listen to the team in its own voice, e.g. in
| their description of our board bringup.[0]
|
| [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-
| from-...
| electroly wrote:
| Addressing #2 and #3, a "hybrid cloud" architecture can include
| a site-to-site VPN or direct fiber connection to a cloud. In
| AWS, Direct Connect data transfer pricing effectively makes
| your on-prem DC or colocation facility into an availability
| zone in your AWS Region. Direct Connect is $0.02/GB egress (out
| of AWS) and free ingress (into AWS), which is a better deal
| than cross-AZ data transfer within the AWS Region. Cross-AZ
| within an AWS Region is effectively $0.02/GB in _both_
| directions.
|
| This way, you can run your big static workloads on-prem to save
| money, and run your fiddly dynamic workloads in AWS and
| continue to use S3.
|
| That said, if a hybrid cloud architecture is your plan and you
| desire a managed rack-at-a-time experience, AWS Outposts would
| seem to be the safer pick. They've been shipping for years and
| they have public pricing that you can look at. I'm not sure
| that Oxide specifically has an opening for customers who want
| to keep their cloud. I wish them luck.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/pricing/
| lijok wrote:
| Well done and congratulations to the Oxide team ! Very excited to
| see where this company goes
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am extremely proud of everyone at Oxide. It's been a fantastic
| place to work, and finally getting to this point feels awesome.
| Of course, there is so much more to do...
|
| For funsies, it's neat to look back at the original announcement
| and discussion from four years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21682360
| runlevel1 wrote:
| As someone who's worked on on-prem infra automation pretty much
| my entire career, I'm rooting for you.
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