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When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux. Yes they are
by eduction 3y ago
When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux.
Yes they are using illumos/Solaris to host this but they don't sell on that, they sell on the functionality of this layer — allowing people to deploy to owned infra in a way that is similar to how they'd deploy to AWS or Azure. How much do you ever think about the system hosting your VM on those clouds? You think about your VMs, the API or web interface to deploy and configure, but not the host OS. With Oxide racks the customers are not maintaining the illumos substrate (as long as Oxide is around).
You could be right about demand, there is risk in a venture like this. But presumably the team thought about this - I think folks who worked at Sun, Oracle, Joyent, and Samsung and made SmartOS probably developed a decent sense of market demand, enough to make a convincing case to their funders.
- yencabulator 3y ago> When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux. Now you need to know both the OS they chose and the OS you chose... (No, I don't believe it'll be 100% hands-off for the host. This is an early stage product, with a lot of custom parts, their own distributed block storage, hypervisor, and so on.)
- sanderjd 3y agoI have no clue what OS runs my VMs on EC2.
- tinco 3y agoThis true for other hypervisors too. Enterprises are still paying hundreds of millions to VMware, who knows what's going on in there? I wouldn't have picked Opensolaris, but it's a lot better than other vendors that are either fully closed source, or thin proprietary wrappers over Linux with spotty coverage and you're not allowed to touch the underlying OS for risk of disrupting the managed product.
- sgt 3y agoWhat's more important is that the team actually knows Illumos/Solaris inside out. You can work wonders with a less than ideal system. That said, Illumos is of high quality in my opinion.
- Always_Anon 3y agoSeems risky considering how small of a developer pool actively works on illumos/Solaris. The code is most definitely well engineered and correct, but there are huge teams all around the world deploying on huge pools of Linux compute that have contributed back to Linux.
- tinco 3y agoThey had a bug in the database they are using that was due to a Go system library not behaving correctly specifically on illumos. They've got enough engineering power to deal with such a thing but damn..
- mbakke 3y agoIf everyone had this mindset we would be running our workloads on Microsoft Windows by now. GNU/Linux was also "risky" at some point.
- yencabulator 3y agoLinux grew up in the bedrooms of teenagers. It was risky in the era of 486 and Pentiums. The environment and business criticality of a $1-2M rack-size computer is quite different.
- ddalex 3y agoThis is a skewed view - the critical piece that made Linux "enterprise-ish" was the memory management system that was contributed by IBM, part of the SCO lawsuit
- 3y ago
- speed_spread 3y agoI have a feeling they knew exactly from the start who their customers would be: People who have the budget to care about things like trust and observability in a complex system. But these would also be the kind of customers who require absolute secrecy and so this why you don't hear about them even though they might have bankrolled a sizable portion of the operation. Just like the first Cray to officially be shipped was actually serial number 2...
- jeffrallen 3y agoCan you imagine trying to investigate Bryan for a security clearance? "Sir, if you have nothing to hide, why do you talk so fast, and pronounce words like a foreigner who learned English from a book?" :) We love you Bryan, never change.
- eduction 3y agoOh to be a fly on the wall for the first Oxide<>Oracle partnership discussion…
- jeffrallen 3y agoBryan: "Steve, I think you should take this meeting with Larry..."