16 ms·
Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello
- rob74 5y agoOnly tangentially related: what I find strange about "Oxide" (styled as "0xide" - the first character is a zero) is that they got very close to actually having a valid hex number in C/C++/Rust notation (0x1de) as a logo, but stopped short...
- kaoladataveez 5y agoyes it's crazy!
- tonoto 5y agoIt still amazes me that Oxide actually managed to grab the perfect PCI vendor ID https://pcisig.com/membership/member-companies?combine=01de https://pcisig.com/membership/member-companies?combine=01de
- monocasa 5y agoThat's fantastic. And here I thought that Intel's vendor ID of 0x8086 was cute.
- rcarmo 5y agoKudos. I've been looking at that stuff but have lacked the bandwidth to even think about getting it to run (wish I could, really).
- BluSyn 5y agoIs it weird that I'm insanely excited about Oxide as a product, even though I have absolutely no need or use case for it?
- mxuribe 5y agoSame here!
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoNot at all; they're building a cool tech stack, but the only thing they sell is super expensive hardware that no individual - and not even that many businesses! - is likely to be able to afford.
- bcantrill 5y agoSo, the only thing really inherent about our price point is that we're selling compute by the rack: as it turns out, a whole rack of server-class CPUs (and its accompanying DRAM, flash, NICs, and switching ASICs) is pretty expensive! But this doesn't mean that it's a luxury good: especially because customers won't need to buy software separately (as one does now for hypervisor, control plane, storage software, etc.), the Oxide rack will be very much cost competitive with extant enterprise solutions. Cost competitive as it may be, it doesn't mean that it hits the price point for a home lab, sadly. One of the (many) advantages of an open source stack is allowing people to do these kinds of experiments on their own; looking forward to getting our schematics out there too!
- eaasen 5y agoIt also turns out that not many people have 3-phase power and can support a heat/power load of 15kW in their homes ;)
- semi-extrinsic 5y agoI actually suspect it would be a lot easier to support 15kW of power in my home than 15 kW of cooling. I know several people with 2x 240V 32A 3-phase in their garage, that's 20+ kW at any reasonable power factor. But a 15 kW cooler that would work in summer would annoy the hell out of any neighbours living closer than a mile.
- 0des 5y agoSimple solution: Turn those neighbours into shareholders and they can sleep to the sound of money all summer long :)
- EvanAnderson 5y agoI'm enthusiastic about their products and the company in general, too. I don't often feel like I'd like to be an employee, but Oxide sounds like it would a very exciting gig (but I lack any skill set to remotely justify even contacting them-- I don't think they're looking for heavily opinionated Windows / Linux sysadmins >smile<). Their gear is targeted at way larger-scale than I'll ever get to use (what with the size of environments I work in). What I hear about their attitudes re: firmware, for example, makes me wish that I could have their gear instead of the iDRAC's, PERCs, and other closed-source roach-motel hardware I'm stuck with. I'm young enough that I just missed the era of computers that Oxide evokes. I put in a couple DEC Alpha-based machines in the late 90s and got a glimpse of what it might be like to have a vendor who provides a completely integrated hardware/software stack and "ecosystem". I'm sure there was operational advantage to being a "DEC shop" or a "Sun shop". The PC market crushed that old school model by wringing out the margin necessary to make that kind of company work. I'd love to see Oxide make a go of it, though.
- bityard 5y agoNope, it's proof that their marketing team is doing a great job.
- bcantrill 5y agoEspecially because there isn't one!
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoWell, on paper:) You, personally, are an amazing marketing department no matter what your official title is; "The Soul of a New Machine", for instance, is brilliant at getting mindshare. To be fair, I'm fairly sure you don't think of what you're doing as marketing, but the only difference I see is that this is much more natural/sincere than 99.99% of similar efforts - you're actually just that passionate and good at sharing your passion.
- bcantrill 5y agoHa, entirely fair! When we raised our initial round, we said that our podcasting microphones were the marketing department, which proved prophetic.
- skadamat 5y agoThis is low key the Developer Relations playbook! I heard about Oxide thru the awesome On the Metal podcast y'all started :]
- caslon 5y agoThey're a tech company that makes actual technology. You're allowed to be excited. Better technology upstream has a habit of floating down the stack in some form or another, even when lawyers make it hard (ZFS was released under a GPL-incompatible license (some people will argue intentionally), yet has influenced over twenty years of filesystem design in the Linux ecosystem for things like btrfs, coincidentally also owned from an IP standpoint largely by Oracle, for example). Who knows? In twenty years, we could see something cool come out of this, like better U-Boot tooling. Or maybe they'll be purchased by Oracle, which would if nothing else be funny this time.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoThat is the really cool thing about them-- they're actually making new computers and the software and firmware to go with them. Everything else "new" seems to be a rehash of the IBM PC (my "server" has an ISA-- ahem-- "LPC" bus... >sigh<). It's so refreshing to see something actually new. The same goes with software and firmware. Any "new" systems software the last 10 years seems to be thin management veneers over real technologies like the Linux kernel, KVM and containers, GNU userland, etc. And it all ends up running on the same cruddy BMC's, "lights-out" controllers, embedded RAID controllers, etc. I get a little bit of excitement at ARM-based server platforms (and RISC-V, for that matter) but everything there seems to be at even less of an "enterprise" level (from a reliability, serviceability, and management perspective) than the PC-based servers I already loathe.
- zozbot234 5y agoKVM and containerization are not just "thin management veneers", they enable all sorts of new features.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoI'm sorry I wasn't clear. KVM and containers are the technology. The "new" stuff I'm talking about are thin management veneers over these features.
- jjav 5y agoI'm a huge fanboy of Oxide, hope they succeed, the world needs more of this. I'm very sad about what Silicon Valley has become. We speak of "tech companies" but they mostly no longer exist. What are the big names in Silicon Valley now? Advertising companies, for the most part. A movie company. Online shopping. Social whatevers. None of these companies sell tech products, they are not tech companies. Sure, they use tech internally but so do law offices and supermarkets, those aren't tech companies either. I miss the Silicon Valley of actual tech companies. Sun, SGI, HP (the actual tech HP of back then), etc. Apple survives, but focused on consumer-level stuff which I don't find interesting. Oracle is around, but they were always more of a lawyer shop than a tech company. Real hardcode tech companies, do any exist anymore? Oxide is such fresh air, exciting! Every week or so I'm about to send an application, I really want to work there. My partner would kill me though, so I haven't. (They have a flat pay scale that, when living in Silicon Valley, would make it very difficult to support a family.. so I'm stuck cheering from the sidelines.)
- panick21_ 5y agoI am exited about Hubris OS and a few of the other bits. But my secret hope his to eventually get an Oxide branded developer laptop. The design language alone would make it worth it. But not holding my breath as that clearly not their priority.
- gennarro 5y agoUnrelated: But anyone remember xoxide.com? The computer building site from the early 2000s? One of my favorite sites of all time.
- SamReidHughes 5y agoYes. The company still exists as Turn5; they pivoted to cars.
- proxysna 5y agoGlad to see oxide on HN. Sick stack.
- nwilkens 5y agoI am very excited about what Oxide is doing, including how the work is being open sourced, and upstreamed. I also love that they continued to bet on Illumos and am looking forward to the continued growth and development in the Illumos space.
- cmdrk 5y agoI get that Oxide has a lot of ex-Joyent folks, but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. In many ways this feels like SmartOS all over again - a killer concept that will be eclipsed by a technically inferior but more tractable (for contributors, for management) solution.
- porker 5y agoAs someone who got massively excited by SmartOS, only to see adoption never reach even the minimal levels I hoped for - yes, I hear you. What would the hosting story look like now if 8(?) years ago 25% of servers had adopted SmartOS?
- EvanAnderson 5y agoI got massively excited by SmartOS, too. Coming from a vSphere and Hyper-V world I found it to be a joy to use. The way that Illumos zones leverage ZFS is really, really cool. The tooling in SmartOS was very nice to use, too. I never used it in production anywhere, admittedly. I also never got a chance to try out Triton. I'm on the fence about whether or not I keep my SmartOS hosts in my home network now that Illumos is a second-class citizen when it comes to OpenZFS.
- NexRebular 5y agoWe run Triton and individual SmartOS boxes in production. They have pretty much replaced all of our VMWare and linux-based hypervisors save some very specific use cases, mostly relating to GPU passthrough and NVIDIA. The case with OpenZFS does worry me as well. I fear the developers start slowly introducing linuxisms thus sacrificing portability and stability for the great penguin.
- nwilkens 5y agoWe also run Triton on our public cloud @mnx.io I would love to hear more about the replacement of VMware experience and any other Triton details good/bad.
- asdfljk3ljk 5y ago
- asdfljk3ljk 5y ago
- yardie 5y agoLove what they are doing. And as a cloud and on-prem supporter I get what they are trying to accomplish. If you haven't heard you should check out their podcast, "On the Metal [0]" It's a truly a gift especially if you are an elder millenial. [0] https://oxide.computer/podcasts https://oxide.computer/podcasts
- jjav 5y agoThe podcast is awesome. Wish they would continue with more episodes!
- mwcampbell 5y agoThey've been doing Twitter Spaces for several months now, with recordings and show notes here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/twitter-spaces https://github.com/oxidecomputer/twitter-spaces Disclosure: I was the main speaker on one of their spaces.
- RealityVoid 5y agoWhaaaaaaattt. And I've been here waiting for a new podcast, like an idiot... when they had this... Thanks for the info!
- panick21_ 5y agoThey are quite different from the podcasts. Wider range of topics and not as historically focused. I hope they do both in the future. Recommendations technical: - Twitter Space 12/13/2021 -- The Pragmatism of Hubris - Twitter Space 12/6/2021 -- Tales from the Bringup Lab - Twitter Space 11/29/2021 -- The Sidecar Switch Historical: - Docker, Inc., an Early Epitaph - Twitter Space 7/5/2021 -- NeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories - Twitter Space 5/31/2021 -- Silicon Cowboys - Twitter Space 8/16/2021 -- The Showstopper Show All of them are worth watching.
- slyall 5y agoTIL. On one hand I'm excited at the new content but a bit weird they way they stealth shutdown the podcast and started the twitter spaces thing up without saying anything or updating their homepage. Even their twitter feed only mentions the twitter space a couple of times (and doesn't appear to link to the archive).
- dcre 5y agoOxide is hiring in the following areas: electrical engineering, security, embedded, control plane + API, internal systems automation, dev tools, and product design. (I work there.) https://oxide.computer/careers https://oxide.computer/careers
- dls2016 5y agoCurious... if I'm still in the "triage" bucket after 6 weeks should I assume the ship has sailed? I was really hoping to hear back one way or the other!
- quadruplebond 5y agoThey got back to me after about 5.5 weeks (it was a no, but nicely worded). I think they are just really busy.
- dcre 5y agoNo, you will hear back. We're trying really hard to keep to the 6 weeks thing but sometimes we don't succeed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 0des 5y agoPlease get back to them today, this is a prompt or cue to rescue this one from falling through the cracks. You never know...
- robocat 5y agoI would think that startups would want to bias for people that can make good decisions quickly, within a short decision time. Perhaps hardware startups want more conservative employees? Also in my experience, a fabulous candidate is sometimes only available for a very short time window (they either have become available due to unforeseen circumstances, or they are snapped up by a faster mover). Is six weeks fast in your opinion?
- stock_toaster 5y agoI use vm-bhyve on FreeBSD current. The little bit of propolis described in the post reminds me of it a bit, but in rust (with a service/api interface) instead of just cli and shell. Sounds neat! I wonder how hard it would be to port to FreeBSD.
- ArchOversight 5y agoThere's some changes they have made to bhyve that would need to get ported to FreeBSD first.
- psanford 5y agoI've not looked at Illumos distros seriously in a long time, but the reason given for rejecting OmniOS seems really strange to me. My general impression was that OmniOS was a tight, server oriented distro that had a sane release schedule and up to date security patches. Who cares if they use the word "enterprise" in their marketing copy?
- BaconPackets 5y agoI'm currently reading up on this, but I'm struggling to match a use case. It's not Openstack. It's not VMware. It's not kubernetes. It's not proxmox. It's not Xen. It's not Anthos. It's not GCDE. It's not Outposts. So who and what is it for? Where is the use case that none of these other products fit the bill? Especially for an on premise use case.
- steveklabnik 5y agoThis article is about technical details of the product that aren't user-facing. The business is fairly straightforward: we sell computers, a rack at a time. You as a customer can buy a rack, and put it in your data center. The rack offers an in-browser management console, built on top of an API you can use too. You use these tools to set up virtual machines. You can then use those VMs however you want. You get the cloud deployment model but with the "I buy the servers" ownership model. There's a few different advantages depending on how you want to look at it. Starting from a rack as the smallest unit rather than 1U brings a lot of advantages, but there aren't really vendors currently selling these sorts of things, instead "the hyperscalers" have internal teams building stuff like this. There are a lot of organizations who want hyperscale style servers but aren't going to start a division to begin making them themselves. Another advantage is that everything is designed to work with the rest of it: you (or the OEM you're buying from) are not cobbling together a bunch of hardware, firmware, and software solutions from disparate vendors and hoping the whole thing works. Think "Apple," or "Sun," rather than "IBM PC Compatible." This is easier for users, as well as allows us to build systems we believe are more reliable. There's also smaller things, like "as much as possible everything is open source/free software," which matters to some folks (and allows for interesting things like the above blog post to happen!) and is less important to others.
- BaconPackets 5y agoThanks! That gives me a bit more context.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
- NexRebular 5y agoI wonder if that stack would run on a HPe bladesystem. Definitely something to try out after hours...
- nickdothutton 5y agoThere is still a place for fully integrated and engineered systems. If you have the need for high levels of concurrency, performance, availability, and need to know… not guess… what your opex is going to look like. I’m a user and supporter of cloud providers, but there are some fat, fat margins being booked there. Not every company can have a storage team, network team, and compute team to integrate those things properly. 0xide is one of the few really interesting new tech companies out there. I have to admit some bias, as I was involved with a company offering a “poor mans vBlock” around 2010. We didn’t grow fast large but we never once lost a deal against commodity hardware vendors. They were easy to beat.