It sort of reminds me of a Dell blade chassis that I pulled out of a DC last year - it was pretty impressive tech that I hadn&#x27;t dealt with. 6 power supplies that I think could take 110v or 220v, but you needed 220v for full capacity. All of them were hot-swappable and as long as you had 3 powered it would keep running. The compute sleds were modular and it also had integrated networking as mentioned in this article. All obviously crafted to a very high standard; even the plastic fan cages felt premium (and I&#x27;m told it cost accordingly back in 2010 or so).Also a former employer who was a bit below the hyperscaler level also had what they called &quot;roll-in racks&quot;, though I believe they were just taking standard servers and networking gear and integrating them somewhere (presumably with cheap labor) and then bringing them into the DC as needed.So I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a particularly new concept, but I agree it looks like it has some potential as a product.

Oxide is a bit of a darling child on HN - I think a lot of people (myself included) find it interesting that they are trying to re-engineer something somewhat commoditized and boring (servers) into something cool

32 1P servers in a 42U rack is impressive? If you use 1U servers, they would only use up 32 units, leaving with 10 units for storage and networking.Also, I remember for example HP BladeCenter BL20p systems. There you would have up to 8 or 16 servers per 6 rack units IIRC. So about 56 to 112 servers in 42U.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HPE_BladeSystem" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HPE_BladeSystem</a>

Ever seen blades you can really pack in density there.

It seems like they have managed to fit 32 1P servers in a 42U rack. That&#x27;s pretty impressive, I have to admit. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen that level of density before.

Is this a big deal? I clicked on this skeptically, but...it actually seems like kind of a big deal? It is at least technically impressive, since it seems like they&#x27;re eliminated a ton of datacenter pain points with the mechanical design.

Like Dell and Bladelogic used to be? Or VMWare ESXi and friends? Or...

Modern tech stack for managing data centers using tightly integrated hardware and software.

They have been on HN numerous times over the years iirc. But yeah, I had completely forgotten what they did and had to read through all of it.

If it is on-prem, calling it &quot;cloud&quot; computer is imho misleading &#x2F; marketing term.

It appears to be an all in one, preconfigured&#x2F;partially-or-completely assembled rack server for on-prem hosting, complete with pre-configured software.Just my perception given the front page. I agree it&#x27;s a bit vague.

I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re trying to be AWS. They&#x27;re trying to sell a product that greatly simplifies doing on-site cloud for companies. So they sell the physical hardware&#x2F;software bundle and not time.

This seems to be around selling the whole piece of hardware not just &quot;time on that&quot;.That being said I&#x27;d still expect a monthly service fee for networking, electricity and service in general.

They want a lot of control over all the hardware in their servers. NVIDIA isn&#x27;t interested in that, so they can&#x27;t provide those types of servers.

There is still a huge amount of stuff not using GPU and never will. Claiming that&#x27;s only for 2020 is pure nonsense.They are likely looking at future racks with GPU as well, but as a first product getting the basics right makes more sense.

Oxide&#x27;s goal is that they, and by extension their customers, have as much visibility and control over the software stack in these racks as possible, and that includes firmware. They started developing these systems before the current wave of interest in machine learning led by ChatGPU and Stable Diffusion really got underway.Nvidia GPU drivers are very proprietary, which means that admins and developers have limited visibility into them if they misbehave in any way. This goes against Oxide&#x27;s philosophy of full visibility into a system that you purchase.Nvidia&#x27;s CUDA software has a significant lead ahead of AMD and Intel GPUs, and they&#x27;re not going to open source it any time soon. But this is a rapidly changing landscape, and AMD and Intel and others are pouring an enormous amount of research into getting their hardware and software to match what Nvidia has going. Nvidia is in pole position, but they&#x27;re not guaranteed to stay there.There&#x27;s still a large market for the CPU workloads that Oxide is offering. For now, Oxide will be concentrating on meeting this traditional compute demand. But you&#x27;re right to point out that in 2023, the absence of a top tier GPU in these racks is noticeable. I suspect Oxide will want to include some form of GPU or TPU into the next version of their system, but they won&#x27;t just grab whatever hardware happens to be in fashion. It needs to work with their system as a whole.

Now to see how their development timeframes and synchronization efforts with big hardware companies go.This is where they will enter the real “hard” part of hardware, with an exec team from software. Can they respond to the market while making hardware?They seem to have presented as generally thoughtful about their approach. If they can release major variants about annually or even sub-annually that is what I think will enable them to win.

Weird there’s no mention of GPU at all when you’d think that’s what would prick up the ears of the hosting companies ….. stack a pile of GPUs in a rack, surely you can sell time on that.The Oxide machines seem to be aimed at 2020.

Here&#x27;s a bit of history: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bcantrill.dtrace.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bcantrill.dtrace.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-soul-of-a-new-co...</a>

Literally on the main page there is a picture of a big computer. And then it says:Oxide Cloud
ComputerNo Cables. No Assembly.
Just Cloud.Contact SalesHow much easier can they make it? They clearly want to sell computers.

I&#x27;ll second that, they should make it clear what they&#x27;re selling and what they have to offer. Every company should have this in their main&#x2F;landing page... If I can&#x27;t understand what you&#x27;re selling&#x2F;offering in 30sec, then I&#x27;m not interested :-)If you take some time and read around their site you&#x27;ll see that they&#x27;re offering a ready to run (turnkey) server. They have everything packed together, they&#x27;ve integrated everything that is needed (CPU, disk, networking...) into a nice looking cabinet, with not too many wires and they&#x27;re selling it as a complete package.If you&#x27;re in need of a server (cloud computer) and you don&#x27;t want to but separate components and unpack them and connect them yourself, then this looks like a possible solution.

Designing a hardware-software combination to allow for the managing of compute (and networking and storage) to occur at the rack-level rather at the individual-device (server, switch, etc) level, so that large(r)-scale operators can manage cattle more easily (rather than herding cats&#x2F;pets).

It&#x27;s a rack of servers you can buy for a lot of money and put in a datacenter. And once you plug it in and turn it on and do whatever setup is required, you&#x27;re supposed to be able to spin up vms on it.

Literally on the main page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;</a>

The site is really hard to navigate. I eventually looked at the footer and found a link to the technical specifications <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;product&#x2F;specifications" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;product&#x2F;specifications</a> They give an idea of the beast, especially the dimensions and weight<pre><code> Dimensions H x W x D
 2354mm (92.7&quot;) x 600mm (23.7”) x 1060mm (41.8&quot;)

 Weight
 Up to ~2,518 lbs (~1,145 kg)
</code></pre>
It&#x27;s a rack.BTW, they are following some no pictures policy. I found only a few pictures of boards but no picture of the product as a whole.

Also this. Looks technically great but how do you sell this to business? Whats the price range? Is this supposed to be an acceptable solution between on-prem and cloud as we start to realise the true costs of being hooked on cloud when your a large org and not a startup?

This is exactly what it is, plus custom &quot;cloud&quot; software

Mainframes also do lots of other things that this doesn&#x27;t really do. Like allowing you to pretend its a bunch of multi-core machines, or even a single one.

They&#x27;ve reinvented the IBM Mainframe. Big rack-sized box with lots of redundant hardware that serves guest VMs. This is basically a zSeries in drag.The key difference is the price structure -- IBM leases the hardware wherever they can get away with it, and uses a license manager to control how many of the machine&#x27;s resources you can access (based on how much you can bear to pay). This, however, is like a mainframe you own.

In a data center you have racks of computers performing all of the workloads. At this point these racks are fairly standardized in terms of sizing and ancillary features. These are built-out to solve the following:<pre><code> * Physical space - The servers themselves require a certain amount of room and depending on the workloads assigned will need different dimensions. These are specified in rack &quot;units&quot; (U) as the height dimension. The width is fixed and depths can vary but are within a standard limit. A rack might have something like 44U of total vertical space and each server can take anywhere from 1-4U generally. Some equipment may even go up to 6U or 8U (or more).

 * Power - All rack equipment will require power so there are generally looms or wiring schemes to run all cabling and outlets for all powered devices in the rack. For the most part this can be run on or in the post rails and remains hidden other than the outlet receptacles and mounted power strips. This might also include added battery and power conditioning systems which will eat into your total vertical U budget. Total rack power consumption is a vital figure.

 * Cooling - Most rack equipment will require some minimum amount of airflow or temperature range to operate properly. Servers have fans but there will also be a need for airflow within the rack itself and you might have to solve unexpected issues such as temperature gradients from the floor to the ceiling of the rack. Net heat output from workloads is a vital figure.

 * Networking - Since most rack equipment will be networked there are standard ways of cabling and patching in networks built into many racks. This will include things such as bays for switches, some of which may eat into the vertical U budget. These devices typically aggregate all rack traffic into a single higher-throughput network backplane that interconnects multiple racks into the broader network topology.

 * Storage - Depending on the workloads involved storage may be a major consideration and can require significant space (vertical Us), power, and cooling. You will also need to take into account the bus interconnects between storage devices and servers. This may also be delegated out into a SAN topology similar to a network where you have dedicated switches to connect to external storage networks.
</code></pre>
These are some of the major challenges with rack-mounted computing in a data center among many others. What&#x27;s not really illustrated here is that since all of this has become so standardized we can now fully integrate these components directly rather than buying them piece-meal and installing them in a rack.This is what Oxide has to offer. They have built essentially an entire rack that solves the physical space, power, cooling, networking, and storage issues by simply giving you a turn-key box you plant in your data center and hook power and interconnects to. In addition it is a fully integrated solution so they can capture a lot of efficiencies that would be hard or impossible in traditional design.As someone with a lot of data center experience I am very excited to see this. It is built by people with the correct attitude toward compute, imo.

The way I interpret it: an integrated stack of compute, storage and networking hardware and monitoring software that you can plug in to your data center (owned or colo) and can e.g. deploy Kubernetes to, and then use as a deployment target for your services.The main USP: you own it, you&#x27;re not renting it. You&#x27;re not beholden to big cloud&#x27;s pricing strategies and gotchas.Secondary USP, why you buy this rather than DIY &#x2F; rack computer vendor: it&#x27;s a vertically integrated experience, it&#x27;s preassembled, it&#x27;s plug and play, compatibility is sorted out, there&#x27;s no weird closed third party dependencies. Basically, the Apple experience rather than the PC experience.

The Oxide has everything you need to stand up your own private cloud, and everything works together down to the software. It&#x27;s a great alternative to buying and managing servers, switches, storage, power management, KVMs, all of the software in between, and the tens of professional services contracts required to glue it all together.It&#x27;s the iPhone of hyperconverged infrastructure.(Sorry; three sentences.)

This thing is the definition of vendor lock in. It&#x27;s a rack full of non-commodity hardware using non-standard connectors and a bunch of custom software.The industry moved to commodity x86 for compute for a reason.

Can somebody explain in a sentence or two what this actually is and what the benefits are?

&quot;Microserver&quot; designs have failed several times. AMD Epyc is basically twelve 7840s in an even smaller space and you can partition it any way you want.

I wonder how effective AMD 7840 would be as a cloud CPU. 8 cores, fast GPU, AV1 video encoder. Tiny SBC machines …. you could probably stack a bunch of them in a rack.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asrockind.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;4X4-7840U-1U" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asrockind.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;4X4-7840U-1U</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=zMYn2Gf3vTe-qMl8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WCRK-Uwb0EA?si=zMYn2Gf3vTe-qMl8</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;apu&#x2F;amd-ryzen-7-7840u" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;apu&#x2F;amd-ryzen-7-7840u</a>

So just hyperconverged infrastructure with a cute name?

Have they basically done for the data centre what iMac did for computers in about year 1999 (or whenever!)

It would be interesting to sell a data center in a container.  Cooling, power supply, compute, storage, and network, all in a box.  You supply power, a big network pipe, and the piping to external heat exchangers.

&gt; They sell servers, but as a finished product.They sell rack-as-compute.[0] Their minimum order is one rack: You plug in power and network, connect to the built-in management software (API), and start spinning up VMs.[0] With built-in networking and storage.

Same here. I really want to work on one of these. I got in the industry at the tail end of the time when people used Sun and DEC gear. I got to use just a little bit of it and it seemed so much more &quot;put together&quot; then PC stuff is even now.Oxide feels like it&#x27;ll be that &quot;integrated&quot; experience, but with the added benefit of software freedom.

I wish they’d sell a tabletop version for hobbyists, but realize this is probably a distraction.  But… the problem with a lot of these systems (including the old Sun boxes and things like ibm mainframes and the AS&#x2F;400) is that they sound cool but there’s no real way for the typical new developer to “get into them” for fun and, as a result, you lose the chance for some developer selling it to their company based on his experience with the things.

100%.I’m actually extremely impressed. I want one. I haven’t worked in a data center in years, but I’d be tempted to do it again just to get my hands on one.

I think Dell, IBM &amp; HP all went through a &quot;blade&quot; era where they built cableless systems that plugged into a backplane.

While working in telecom data centers circa 2016 I&#x27;ve seen many single rack computers from Dell, IBM, HP, Huawei... Not sure that&#x27;s a new ideia, ex. the open source bits.

Those of us who&#x27;ve bought large &quot;turn-key&quot; solutions from Dell etc. have often discovered that it&#x27;s actually just a cobbled-together bunch of things which may or may not work well together on a good day, depending on what you&#x27;re trying to do. Just because it&#x27;s all got the word &quot;Dell&quot; written on it, doesn&#x27;t mean that the components were all engineered by people who were working together to build a single working system.When it breaks, good luck!

&gt; Proxmox and a full rack of Supermicro gear would not be as sophisticated, but end result is pretty much the same, with I imagine far far better bang for buck.I think the question is how well they can do the management plane. Dealing with the &quot;quirks&quot; of a bunch of grey box supermicro stuff is always painful in one way or another. The drop shipped, pre-cabled cab setups are definitely nice but that&#x27;s only a part of what Oxide is doing here. No cables and their own integrated switching sounds nice too (stuff from the big vendors like UCS is closer to this ballpark but also probably closer to the cost too).I suspect cooling and rack density could be better in the Oxide solution too, not having to conform to the standards might afford them some possibilities (although that&#x27;s just a guess, and even if they do improve there these may not be the bottlenecks for many).

Classic hacker news!
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9224">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9224</a>

Also future datacenter builds are going to be focusing on specific applications which means specific builds. I think Nvidia has a much better chance here with their superpod than Oxide. The target use case is pretty unclear.On-prem buyers are doing cost reduction and cost reduction targets things like, as one example, the crazy cost of GPU servers on the CSPs. Your run of the mill stuff is very hard to cost reduce.You can see their sort of lack of getting it by using Tofino2 as their switch. That’s just a very bad choice that was almost certainly chosen for bad reasons.

AWS outposts have been there in the market for a long time .. though I am sure there are differences but to say extisting cloud vendors were blind to on prem requirements is a stretch.

&gt; Existing vendors will provide rack integration services and deliver a turn key solution like this.My experience with the likes of Dell is that they&#x27;ll deliver it but they won&#x27;t support it.Sure, there&#x27;s a support contract. And they try. But while they sell a box that says Dell, the innards are a hodgepodge of stuff from other places. So when certain firmware doesn&#x27;t work with something else, they actually can&#x27;t help because they don&#x27;t own it, they&#x27;re just a reseller.

Existing vendors will provide rack integration services and deliver a turn key solution like this. Also vendors of virtualization management software have partnerships with hardware suppliers and be happy to deliver fully integrated solutions if you&#x27;re buying by the rack. The difference is in those cases you have flexibility in the design which seems to be missing here.Proxmox and a full rack of Supermicro gear would not be as sophisticated, but end result is pretty much the same, with I imagine far far better bang for buck.I like it, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like a big deal or revolutionary in any way.

This is a one time cost, AWS is a rent only model

You own this. AWS Outpost is leased and you still also pay for the resource usage on top of the outpost unit itself. And this would not be integrated with your AWS account.

AWS only rents their racks and are very expensive.I do wonder if AWS will eventually go down market if oxide gets any scale.It seems like AWS has all the pieces to compete with Oxide if they care to.

This is a turn-key solution, ready to use without eventually dealing with multiple devices with its own firmware and caveats revealing after where put to work together.
The closest to that is that AWS managed rack that works with the web APIS you know already

I would assume so. They&#x27;ve said before you can make modifications to the firmware and deploy it yourself if you so wish. That&#x27;s one of the major reasons that making the firmware open source is so useful.

&gt;Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch.Is this true? Can you set your own root of trust for the firmware signing key and build and deploy it yourself?

It&#x27;s meant for orgs running at a certain scale, but you&#x27;d be surprised how early that starts making sense.  AWS isn&#x27;t exactly paying the economy of scale savings on to you.

Your business model is not the only one in existence.

On site backup inventoryDC build out cost and effortPower cooling requirementsDark fiber bandwidth requirementNew headcount to support all thisNo thanks , I have widgets to make and sell and a business to run.

Specs are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;product&#x2F;specifications" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;product&#x2F;specifications</a>Prices are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;sales" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;sales</a> ;)

Awesome. This would be especially useful in science but the lack of GPUs is a non-starter. :(

If they standardize and open the server shape and plug interface then it gets really cool. Then I could go design a GPU server myself and add it to their rack. The rack is no longer a hyperconverged single-user proprietary setup and becomes something that can be extended and repurposed.

&gt; They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendorsIt seems like they&#x27;re trying to hit a middle ground between cloud vendors and fully decoupled server equipment companies.Using Oxide is likely cheaper over the life of the hardware than using a cloud vendor. A company who already has in-house expertise on running racks of systems may be less the target market here than people who want to do cloud computing but under their own control.

&gt; One of the most obvious examples of the problem with this approach is that they&#x27;re shipping previous generation servers on Day 1. One can easily buy current generation AMD servers from a number of vendors.&gt; Their coupling approach will most likely leave them perpetually behindThis is a startup that took years to get their initial hardware developed. The time between this version and the version using the next version of AMD chips will be shorter than the time it took to develop this product. This is not an inherent issue with coupling vs decoupling.Also, most servers are rarely running on the most recent cpus anyway. At least in companies I&#x27;ve worked at with on-site hardware they&#x27;re usually years (sometimes even a decade) out of date getting the last life sucked out of them before too many internal users start complaining and they get replaced.

&gt; will probably never be ideal for more savvy customersIDK about every use case, but slightly older generations of CPUs would affect me roughly zero. I&#x27;m sure there are things so compute-intensive that one would care very much, but a lot of people probably wouldn&#x27;t bat an eye about that, and not because they&#x27;re unsavvy.To the extent that these things are supported as a whole by the vendor rather than a bunch of finger pointing though, that could be massive, specifically in terms of how many staff members you could &quot;not hire&quot; compared to if you had to employ someone to both build and continually maintain it.I&#x27;m posting this not to invalidate what you&#x27;re saying, just to say that a little predictable upfront amount of money (the premium) will be spent very happily by lots of people who value predictability and TCO over initial price.

Coupling vs Decoupling is not some one-sided thing. It&#x27;s a major trade-off.One of the most obvious examples of the problem with this approach is that they&#x27;re shipping previous generation servers on Day 1. One can easily buy current generation AMD servers from a number of vendors.They will also likely charge a significant premium over decoupled vendors that are forced to compete head-to-head for a specific role (server vendor, switch vendor, etc).Their coupling approach will most likely leave them perpetually behind and more expensive.But there are advantages too. Their stuff should be simpler to use and require less in-house expertise to operate well.This is probably a reasonable trade-off for government agencies and the like, but will probably never be ideal for more savvy customers.And I don&#x27;t know how truly open source their work is but if it&#x27;s truly open source, they&#x27;ll most likely find themselves turned into a software company with an open core model. Other vendors that are already at scale can almost certainly assemble hardware better than they can.

&gt; Ironically this looks like the realization of Richard Stallman&#x27;s dream where users can help each other if something doesn&#x27;t work.How is it ironic?

Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway.Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there are many situations where the financials and or enabled options of owning something make a lot of sense. Right now, the kind of experience you get with AWS and co. can only be rented, not bought. Some people want to buy houses instead of renting them.

The fact that it&#x27;s not on linux is one of the great things about it. There is too much linux on critical infrastructure already and the monoculture just keeps on growing.At least with Oxide there is a glimmer of hope for a better future in this regard.

When you&#x27;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&#x2F;Solaris to host this but they don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Back in the day... Sun Micro was a GOAT and pushed the envelope on Unix computing 20-30 years ago. Solaris was stable and high performing.I don&#x27;t run on-prem clusters or clouds but know a couple people who do and, at large enough scale, it is a constant &quot;fuck-shit-stack on top of itself&quot; (to quote Reggie Watts). There is almost always something wrong and some people upset about it.The promise of a fully integrated system (compute HW, network HW, all firmware&#x2F;drivers written by experts using Rust wherever possible) that pays attention to optimizing all your OpEx metrics is a big deal.It may take Oxide a couple more years to really break into the market in a big way, but if they can stick it out, they will do very well.

Just to be clear, Illumos (it hasn&#x27;t been Solaris in a very long time) is an implementation detail. It&#x27;s not customer facing.

&gt; something no one really wants, or, at best, is nicheCould be! Seems too early to tell though, and remains to be seen whether it pencils. Which is the whole idea of starting a new venture, no?

I don&#x27;t see it as a big deal - rather, I see it as a huge amount of venture cap spent on some very bright people to build something no one really wants, or, at best, is niche.Also, it has little to do with the cloud; it is yet another hyperconverged infra.Weirdly, it is attached to something very few people want: Solaris. This relates to the people behind it who still can&#x27;t figure out why Linux won and Solaris didn&#x27;t.

Can you clarify a bit on what you mean by &quot;chunk&quot; guy? Are you alluding to the ability to distribute work by an isolation mechanism such as cgroups vs machine a-la borg&#x2F;google?

&gt; I just hope they don&#x27;t get killed by acquisition.Private equity in the US has collectively determined that no company shall exist outside of investment ownership. I don&#x27;t know what the ownership structure looks like, but generally speaking, it seems that nearly everyone has a &quot;fuck you&quot; number. Now that Oxide is venturing into Dell and HP&#x27;s turf, I worry someone will get a fix on what Brian&#x27;s number is.

Its a huge deal. I&#x27;m biased though because my own takes on how things should evolve were very similar. I was however completely unsuccessful in getting those ideas into production! And that, that is a huge deal. Through out my career it has been interesting to meet people with great ideas and then they are unable to get them into production, and when the idea does come into production everyone feels like &quot;Wow, this is so obvious why didn&#x27;t we do it sooner?&quot; and some folks are banging their head against the wall :-).One of the more interesting discussions I had during my tenure at Google was about the &quot;size&quot; of the unit of clusters. If you toured Google you got the whole &quot;millions of cheap replaceable computers&quot; mantra. Sitting in Building 42 was a &quot;rack&quot; which had cheap PC motherboards on &quot;pizza dishes&quot; without all that superfluous sheet metal. Bunches of these in a rack and a festoon of network cables. What are the &quot;first class&quot; elements of these machines? Compute? Networking? Storage? Did you replace components? Or a whole &quot;pizza slice&quot; (which Google called an &#x27;index&#x27; at the time). Really a great systems analysis problem.FWIW I&#x27;m more of a &quot;chunk&quot; guy (which is the direction 0xide went) and less of a &quot;cluster&quot; guy (which is the way Google organized their infrastructure). A lot of people associated with 0xide are folks I worked with at Sun in the early days and during that period the first hints of &quot;beowulf&quot; clusters vs &quot;super computers&quot;, was memory one thing (UMA) or did it vary from place to place (NUMA). I have a paper I wrote from that time about &quot;compute viscosity&quot; where the effective compute rate (which at the time largely focused on transactional databases) scaled up with resource (more memory more transactions&#x2F;sec for example) and scaled down with viscosity (higher latencies to get to state meant fewer transactions&#x2F;sec) Sun was invested heavily in the TPC-C benchmarks at the time but they were just one load pattern one could optimize for.These guys have capitalized on all that history and it is fucking amazing! I just hope they don&#x27;t get killed by acquisition[1].[1] KbA is a technique where people who are invested in the status quo and have resources available use those resources to force the investors in a disruptive technology to sell to them and then they quietly bury the disruptive technology.

IBM invented this a long time ago. 
Mainframes.&gt;They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration &gt;problem. They integrated it.

&gt; Ironically this looks like the realization of Richard Stallman&#x27;s dream where users can help each other if something doesn&#x27;t work.that&#x27;s only true if you think that &quot;users&quot; means &quot;people who operate cloud computers&quot;, which is about as far from understanding what Stallman is talking about as is possible. Someone who makes SaaS and runs it on an Oxide computer is no less of a rentier capitalist than someone who makes SaaS and runs it on AWS.

This is actually a pretty big deal.They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it. It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud.Also, they wrote the software. And it&#x27;s all open source. So no &quot;sorry but the third party vendor dropped support for the bios&quot;. You get the source code. Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch.Ironically this looks like the realization of Richard Stallman&#x27;s dream where users can help each other if something doesn&#x27;t work.

You run VMs on their platform, so it doesn&#x27;t lock you in more than any cloud host locks you into their provisioning interface.

The VMs are bhyve on illumos. They&#x27;re about as hard to move off as moving a datacenter sized Proxmox cluster to anything else.

I always thought it&#x27;s just about the hardware but it seems like it also includes it&#x27;s own kind of virtualization &#x2F; provisioning interface for VMs, firewalls and also an overview over running software.Does this &quot;lock&quot; you into the Oxide platform and you just buy into the whole thing instead of buying some server from Dell, then running some Proxmox like software and a Docker host?

I saw a demo from them and it looked nice but then they told me they are stopping at the VM and storage blob level of abstraction.Virtually all the value we get from cloud is in their managed offerings of complex and difficult to admin systems like Kubernetes, Postgres, and managed storage layers.That’s where all the value is but it’s also where all the cost is. If you just want compute, storage, and bandwidth all those can be had at commodity prices. Look at Hetzner, Hivelocity, FDCServers, DataPacket, OVH, or VPS providers like Vultr. You can get dozens of cores, terabytes of SSD, and gigabits of unmetered bandwidth for a few thousand dollars or less. It’s very cheap.Without the high level managed stuff we would be off cloud five minutes from now.I’m sure there is a market for this among people who run on premise data centers, but I think they would have a much larger market if they went further up the software stack. Right now they just look like they are competing with Dell and Supermicro, not Amazon or Google Cloud.

This really is one of these things where every employee in a cheap cost of living area will say &quot;Exactly, man!&quot; and people in an expensive area will see it differently because it might cap them lower than what they could get.I always find that a very naive point of view, of course I would want to earn a US tech salary while living somewhere in the country side, who wouldn&#x27;t. But I&#x27;m also aware that this is not how the world works in reality, there&#x27;s different tax systems, different expense costs and we don&#x27;t live in a global one-market world.I find the strategy of defining different &quot;zones&quot;, like most of the remote first &#x2F; salary transparency companies much more realistic.

Except if everyone gets paid the same, you&#x27;re not being rewarded for the value you provide. I don&#x27;t think salary should be tied to location, but it should be tied to experience, ability, and effort.

Location independence is not the interesting part of Oxide’s compensation strategy. It’s that everyone makes exactly the same. There are no negotiations, no levels, no promotions, and consequently no promo packets or promo projects. This is extremely enticing to FAANG types who are tired of a certain kind of bullshit, at the cost of a certain level of ambition.

Exactly, man! That&#x27;s the way it should be done. It&#x27;s not a company&#x27;s business to decide how much your life should cost. It&#x27;s its business to reward you for the value you provide, and that value is not tethered to your location, so neither should be your salary!

One of the many reasons I like working at Crazyegg.

Why would that be a problem? Surely there are some designers willing to work for $200k.

We&#x27;ve got designers, me included, and a few others on the team who aren&#x27;t engineers. I also hail from what people like to call a &quot;third-world country&quot;. So far it&#x27;s working great, and we&#x27;re hiring more folks from all over the world, not just the USA.

Salary is that high in the US because we have no social net or price caps here. Your on your own for everything. Healthcare, retirement, overpriced homes, out of control rent, etc

That&#x27;s probably [EDIT: decidedly] on the low side for the bay area for rock star devs, and Oxide has lots of rock star devs.  I haven&#x27;t looked but I assume they pay bonuses, probably differential bonuses.

Forget the numbers, just knowing that CEO is not fucking me over to build a second vacation home is Aspen would be enough for me.

Damn that&#x27;s insane. As someone from Europe these salaries are just extreme.If ya&#x27;ll are looking for a remote security engineer from Europe hit me up. :)For those numbers I&#x27;ll walk the servers into the customers myself.

That is only a problem if you insist on hiring people from such expensive areas.  Given Oxide hires remotely, I doubt this is an actual problem for them.

That&#x27;s just base salary. For Staff+ engineers making 600-700k at BigTech, it is probably still a block.But for senior engineers at these companies, 200k is pretty competitive with the base salaries offered at those places

user: sunshowers has been replying in this thread and mentioned going from FAANG-&gt; Oxide and taking what seemed like about a 60% paycut.Yes it is somewhat of a stumbling block, but I&#x27;m betting they are getting extremely high quality employees who are doing it for the passion and not just for the money.

Well, it&#x27;s an immediate stumbling block to hiring anyone currently making more than that, such as senior engineers in the US.

I can work for half of that in Canada. But I don&#x27;t have half of the skills :(

Brilliant way to keep your team focused. No drama or in-fighting about who&#x27;s getting more or less.

&gt; Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location.Man I would love to work for a company like that. I don&#x27;t know why more people don&#x27;t set their startups like that.

I am missing how AWS&#x2F;GCP&#x2F;Azure does not solve this for you.Price point?

Even just a medium business offering would be great. I&#x27;d love to not have to use Dell or HP gear-- anything to get away from the cobbled-together stack of legacy IBM PC compatibility and third-party ODM&#x2F;OEM stuff glue-and-taped together by the vendor.

Same here!I’ve not personally used it, but their stack of software is open source, and according to some commenters in the thread, super high quality.

It&#x27;s not just about maximizing revenue, it&#x27;s also about getting it into developer hands early (homelabs, side projects, college students, etc) so they can become familiar with it, and become an advocate for it within their company. Cloudflare is a good example of this.

I&#x27;d imagine they&#x27;ll get to that eventually, these types of companies generally start at enterprise level because that&#x27;s the most profitable and requires closing smaller numbers of deals. Once the product is proven and their support infrastructure is in place they can go for other market segments to try and maximize revenue

It would be great if Oxide had something like Canonical&#x27;s &quot;Orange Box&quot;&#x2F;cloud-in-a-box for homelabs, evaluation, training (in the management bits) - and hobby work loads!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;jumpstart-training-with-the-orange-box" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;jumpstart-training-with-the-orang...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;hands-on-with-canonicals-orange-box-and-a-peek-into-cloud-nirvana&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;hands...</a>

seconded. it would provide an on-ramp to get familiar with the software without forking over 500k

Not 1U but perhaps a box design that isn’t noisy like a pizza box server.Don’t know if oxide would want or be able to compete in the low cost market but a bigger a more expensive desktop&#x2F;workstation as a mini homelab cloud could be a great option to get people trained on the oxide platform.

Maybe somebody can help me find the $20 one, but the one I can see is $460<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;estore.st.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;estore.st.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;stm32h753i-eval2-cpn.html</a>

Unfortunately they are not planning home lab things anytime soon, per a recent podcast episode [0].If you want to play around with their Hubris OS: &quot;You wanna buy an STM32H753 eval board. You can download Hubris, and then you’ve got – you’ve got an Oxide computer. You have it for 20 bucks.”[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;friends&#x2F;8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;friends&#x2F;8</a>

I really wish oxide had a Homelab&#x2F;consumer centric offering!Spec wise, some low power systems like an Intel NUC, LattePanda Sigma, or Zimaboard. You could fit 3&#x2F;4 of them in a single 1u with a shared power supply. They could even offer a full 1u with desktop grade chips on the same sleds.I have thought about building one myself, but it&#x27;s a large investment of time that I can&#x27;t seem to find lately.

It would be interesting to buy a load of them and set up as a cloud vendor :)

If they lease it to companies, would it be considered opex?

Yes - that makes loads more sense to me. It&#x27;s cool that you can spin stuff up and it&#x27;s all integrated with the hardware - having seen fairly large VMWare installations and all the faff it takes to make them work, this seems really useful. I just don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the same as the cloud, and the article seems to discount the main reason for the cloud: opex, letting you get started (and stopped) quickly and cheaply.

Ya, in the past the messaging was more like &quot;get the ergonomics of the cloud with the economics of owning your own hardware&quot;, I think it&#x27;s confusing to just call it a &quot;cloud computer&quot;

And it&#x27;s as much of a misnomer there.

Private cloud is a thing too: lots of folks run VMware, Hyper-V, or OpenStack in-house.

Of course - every pay as you go service that goes above a certain amount of utilization will be better replaced with up front investment. But that doesn&#x27;t mean that the opex model is bad in general; you&#x27;ve just only picked cases where it&#x27;s bad.

That was the line we were sold by cloud vendors. There is a reason that significant portions of both native cloud and migrated workloads are shifting back to self-hosted; the cost savings never materialized.My google-fu failed to find any articles for or against my statement that weren’t paid advertising or lightweight tech summaries. StackOverflow will have to do. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;are-companies-shifting-away-from-public-clouds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;are-companies-shifting...</a>

The way you put it, this capex thing though is sounding like just sacrificing cashflow for some accounting sophistry.Surely the main benefit of reserved instances is lower TCO and if you can show you can afford AWS for 3 years a bank would surely loan you the money to pay upfront if you can save say 50% it is simply cheaper even with interest.

There&#x27;s two independent issues: capex vs. opex, and flexibility.When opex is a primary benefit of the cloud, that&#x27;s specifically for start-ups and other businesses that have little working capital. The actual primary benefit of the cloud for most cloud customers is flexibility - prior to AWS adoption, getting a server provisioned could be a multi-week if not multi-month affair negotiating between devs or operators and on-prem infrastructure workers to get the servers through capacity planning and provisioning. AWS made provisioning so simple, that you could start to set up auto-scaling, because you had extraordinarily high confidence that the capacity would be immediately available when your autoscaler tried to scale up.But opex is not a benefit of the cloud for heavy&#x2F;established businesses. Cloud opex is a financial expenditure every month that you can&#x27;t get rid of and counts directly against your profits. Indeed, the desire for capex in the cloud is so high that businesses routinely purchase Reserved Instances and other forms of committed usage, which allows accountants to treat the cost of the RI as capex and then discount the expenditure through depreciation (to zero, since there will be nothing to sell when the RI expires) over the lifetime of the RI. It is normal and frequent for businesses to make capital expenditures to reduce their operational expenditures over time, thus increasing their monthly&#x2F;quarterly profits.Oxide&#x27;s unique value proposition is to give customers, particularly those with high monthly cloud bills that they have difficulty reducing, the operational flexibility of cloud computing with the profit-improving benefits of capital expenditures.

Private Cloud allows infrastructure team to run big server parks efficiently, while product teams can &quot;buy&quot; resources easily. It&#x27;s essentially why Amazon made aws, why Google made Borg.For a regional hospital for example, there might be a desire for in-house network and hardware - but perhaps the system for digital patient journals run on Kubernetes and managed databases.

Sure but some businesses care about how much they spend and then about capex vs opex.I&#x27;d rather have $1 in capex than $10 in opex

I&#x27;m a bit confused about them calling it a cloud computer. The primary benefit of cloud is you spend opex instead of capex. Isn&#x27;t this moving back to capex again?

The hypervisor OS is based on Illumos, which was forked from OpenSolaris, and it uses Bhyve from FreeBSD for virtualization.I would imagine the system architecture is different enough that running Linux as the base OS would take some work, for example it doesn&#x27;t have an AMIBIOS.

Reminds of what they worked on before at Sun ZFS storage appliance.Can it run Linux or Windows Data Center as ex-Sun folk they seem to have loved the last open source release before Oracle but now is still community developed variant of SunOS ???.

What makes you think so? According to their website, the compute bit is based on AMD EPYC 7713P CPUs.I can buy these at my local electroncis retailer. So pretty much commodity x86.

Sort of. The big deal with Oxide is that all the legacy compatibility with the IBM PC platform is gone, and the whole stack, top-to-bottom, is built by then (including firmware).It&#x27;s not like commodity x86 gear with black-box (often buggy) firmware and layer-upon-layer of hacks and compatibility kludges to present the hardware interface of a late model IBM PC AT.

Haven&#x27;t blade computers been doing this for a while?

Should be getting reserved instances at least

Most people that would be able to buy these would not, but that makes it more relevant to know how things compare.If you already get a 50% discount on your on-demand prices for AWS, does buying your own cloud make economical sense?

To be fair, if you’re in the market for a system like this, you’re probably not paying rack rate for AWS or Azure, either.

Why though? Quantity based pricing is not hard to express in a table.What is so different about CapEx and a bag of peanuts that defies even providing an approximate range? Number of zeroes, no?I don’t like it, but it is the norm sadly. It’s just a signal for “it’s expensive and if you even care about the number we don’t want to talk with you”.

In fairness, the blogpost argues that owning is more economical than renting. Everybody knows what cloud compute costs and if this more economical then maybe there should be some price indicator?

Weird criticism, for anything involving CapEx it will always require an RFQ and quote.You&#x27;re not buying a bag of peanuts and they will likely price it differently if you&#x27;re buying 1x or 500x.

I wouldn’t buy these without a sales call, but costing it out to less than an order of magnitude would make it a lot easier to determine economic viability.I just hate calling people to determine if we’re going to match, when they could have given me that information up front.

If you are genuinely in the market for multiple racks of servers you (a) know how much a rack of hp&#x2F;dell gear costs, which gets you within an order of magnitude of what this is going to cost, and (b) would not buy one of these without a sales call even if you could.

But there&#x27;s no pricing! How will I know if this could potentially save me money compared to AWS if I cannot make a sensible comparison until I contact sales (or probably after I contact sales).

The ship has sailed many years ago on your definition of cloud computing.  Fight it all you want, you&#x27;re just going to be downvoted.

Sorry, but this is quite a bunch of b... IMHO.Let&#x27;s start with their beliefs:
1. Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.Yeah, no. There&#x27;s still gonna be things like mobile phones which will do some stuff locally. And probably also desktops. And probably also on-prem servers.Which brings us to their belief no. 2:
The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented.If you buy a computer and run virtualized loads on it, then you&#x27;re not doing cloud computing. As simple as that.Basically, as others have commented already, this is just something like a blade server system or a hyperconverged system like for example Nutanix is offering. The only real difference seems to be the open source approach.

Yeah the logo is a bit confusing, but the full name is &quot;Oxide Computer Company&quot;.

The name is &quot;Oxide Computer Company.&quot; But since &quot;0x&quot; is often used for hexidecimal numbers, and &quot;0x1de&quot; happens to be one, we play around with it from time to time.

Is the name of the company &quot;Oxide&quot; or &quot;0xide&quot; (with a leading zero)?All text seems to indicate the former while the logo seems to spell the latter?

$10 per year, minus credit card fees and taxes. If you send a single email to customer support in 5 years the company already loses money. The company can&#x27;t just sell you the HDD and put a warning in the FAQ that you are responsible for data loss. Because that will result in angry emails and bad reviews.How many engineers and how many years does it take to build the infrastructure, write all the software, and deal with all the hardware to provide a photo service that &quot;just works&quot;? How many customers do they need before they break even? And obviously they can&#x27;t raise VC because a business model that is predicated on making basically no money per customer can never have an exit. How would you bootstrap such a thing?It feels strange that physical storage costs almost nothing on amazon but the storage attached to a cloud machine is expensive. But run the numbers and you&#x27;ll see that running a cloud service isn&#x27;t about hardware costs at all.

I guess I don&#x27;t understand how that&#x27;s a radical statement if colocation was a thing even before you could rent cloud resources.

&gt; The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented.This 100%!Not everything needs to be a subscription. Sure there are running costs for operating that cloud computer as well as ongoing software development costs. But having photo albums in the cloud shouldn&#x27;t cost me $30&#x2F;month just because of storage - let me buy that hard drive (and maybe compute why not) and pay $10&#x2F;y for operational costs

AMD and Intel so they keep making desktop CPUs?

No worries, it is just their sales pitch. They&#x27;ll co-exist.

&gt; core beliefs as a company:&gt; Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.Oh god no!Anywhere I can donate to have this not happen? I want my computing on premise, preferably under my table.But well, if it _HAS_ to happen, 0xide is probably a lesser evil.

+1 AgreeOther podcasts I&#x27;d recommend: ADSP [1] (if you&#x27;re into programming), 2.5 admins [2] (if you&#x27;re into computers). But I have no recommendations about hardware design because AFAIK the podcasts you mention and what Oxide is doing are pretty unique.[1] Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adspthepodcast.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adspthepodcast.com&#x2F;</a>[2] Allan Jude, Jim Salter, Joe Ressington <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2.5admins.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2.5admins.com&#x2F;</a>

And they currently run a podcast weekly called &quot;Oxide and Friends&quot; where they talk about miscellaneous things in the software space.The most recent few episodes have been about corporate open source and they&#x27;ve had excellent guests, like Kelsey Hightower. Definitely the best computer related podcasts out there. Bryan and Adam are great hosts and their humor is always a delight.

Added to my podcast player - Thanks!In a similar vein, Embedded.fm is a great podcast for embedded SW. Though I bet Oxide&#x27;s take on embedded rust is a lot different than the hosts of that show!

If you don’t listen to their “On the Metal” podcast, you’re missing out. So many great stories from legends in the industry. Just start with the first episode.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;on-the-metal" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;on-the-metal</a>

I mean, the raw hardware surely costs around 100k, and no way that it costs more than ten million, so you&#x27;re always going to be right with that &quot;ballpark&quot; qualification

I would assume a million dollar. Ballpark.

So the real question is whether 1 Oxide rack can outcompete 2 or 3 racks of normal commodity hardware.Or provide enough white glove after-sales support and written guarantees to peel away low end mainframe customers at a fraction of the price.

I don’t know anything about buying servers, is that expensive?

In the spec sheet it looks like they have options with 16, 24 or 32 &quot;compute sleds&quot; (servers?).

&gt; They mentioned it really quickly in their Oxide an Friends podcast but, IIRC, prices start at $500k. Some of the audience asked if they were going to do a smaller configuration like half or quarter rack. And they said they were looking into it but weren&#x27;t sure the of the business case.That strikes me as being in the right ballpark, but it&#x27;s going to be tough to swallow since that&#x27;s the lowest level of granularity.For most orgs you&#x27;d be left paying for a lot of excess capacity you couldn&#x27;t immediately put to use as you migrate workloads in. I guess in ~4 years once you reach steady state and you&#x27;re retiring &#x2F; replacing these things it all works out, but if you&#x27;re migrating from vmware or something else in a traditional blade&#x2F;chassis world it&#x27;s not like you can just wave a magic wand and move $500k worth of compute over to this thing at once.If you&#x27;re green fielding something, that&#x27;s a lot of cash to sink in on compute you may not need for some time in the future. Never mind your DR site(s) also needing that much...

They mentioned it really quickly in their Oxide an Friends podcast but, IIRC, prices start at $500k. Some of the audience asked if they were going to do a smaller configuration like half or quarter rack. And they said they were looking into it but weren&#x27;t sure the of the business case.

Follow up question would be how much are equivalent solutions from established rack providers?

I know price will vary wildly based on how many you’re buying, but does anyone have the roughest ballpark for how much it would cost to buy one (1), or like two?

Sorry about that, fixed – you can find that information on the specs page now

Ambitious &#x2F; audacious -- and compelling.Pricing??Also &quot;Facilities&quot; link in footer: 404

MPL even, that should satisfy about anyone who&#x27;d want to contribute.

&gt; I&#x27;d like to add that their open source code is also EXTREMELY high quality.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer</a>

Their ring logger was really enlightening to me about the value of Rust enums. Heterogeneous log events are dropped into the ring with some holding only the fact that something happened, and others holding additional data about what happened. Then Humility is able to  print out the contents of the ring either online or in crash dumps. This is how you get logging in nostdlib Rust without ending up without half of a badly implemented printf. Instead, Humility, which has the full stdlib available, formats the enums for the firmware.

I agree. I stole some of their stuff from here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;third-party-api-clients&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;third-party-api-clients&#x2F;tre...</a> when I needed a SendGrid integration. High quality code and proper use of Rust types.

Cogmind (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gridsagegames.com&#x2F;cogmind&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gridsagegames.com&#x2F;cogmind&#x2F;</a>) has those sorts of animations

They are very fun to make as well! I&#x27;ve built my own mini-lib on top of this ASCII rendering library (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ertdfgcvb&#x2F;play.core">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ertdfgcvb&#x2F;play.core</a>).I design them in Monodraw, pass it through a janky converter I wrote that converts text into a json grid of characters. I then render a number of layers that get combined, which is a mix of the static art layer, and others generated from functions that spit out a similar cell based frame.If you&#x27;re interested:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;benjaminleonard&#x2F;c913ddbf23fe7a70f9c25aef0ae13496#file-projectlevelanimation-ts" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;benjaminleonard&#x2F;c913ddbf23fe7a70f9c2...</a>And for what it&#x27;s worth there&#x27;s this ASCII game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StoneStoryRPG" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StoneStoryRPG</a>

On a side note, I really liked their website. The ASCII animations are interesting -- wish there was a video game that had those.

Humility is a debugger, not a code coverage tool.

&gt; ... code is also EXTREMELY high quality. If you&#x27;re an embedded developer go take a look at Hubris and Humility.So, Humility is like MC&#x2F;DC?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Modified_condition&#x2F;decision_coverage" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Modified_condition&#x2F;decision_co...</a>

Tangent. In my admittedly limited experience, embedded code seems to have a tendency to be some of the worst code you can come across. The stuff is already low level and not the most easy to follow, but then embedded developers seem to despise names with more than two letters and a number. Without the datasheet at hand it is impossible to figure out what any of the code does because everything is just an abbreviation or acronym from some block or pin-out diagram.

Some interesting rare choices there (some of which would be applicable to normal userlands or even to language VMs):* Memory access is protected, but addresses are not virtually mapped. The lack of paging of course ties strongly to the inability to dynamically add tasks.* They wish they could have read-only shared libraries (viable since there&#x27;s only one address space) so they could truly be shared, but the current ecosystem assumes mutability is possible (even though in Rust mutable globals are rare).

Yeah, I just skimmed through the reference docs for Hubris and was very impressed with what I saw. No &quot;rocket science&quot;, just (apparently) solid technical decisions that are extremely well justified and documented.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxidecomputer.github.io&#x2F;hubris&#x2F;reference&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxidecomputer.github.io&#x2F;hubris&#x2F;reference&#x2F;</a>

The only big thing missing for now is their OS (or rather, their Illumos distribution), Helios[1].Can&#x27;t wait to read its source code, I was curious since reading this thread[2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;helios">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;helios</a> (if this is not found for you, we&#x27;re in the same boat)[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33337086">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33337086</a>

&gt; their open source code is also EXTREMELY high qualityI would expect nothing less from that crew. They did amazing things at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (RIP), and they continue to do even greater things now.

Thought I had heard the cringiest random names for an oss project, and then...

If those are your complaints, I think they&#x27;re probably doing okay.

With respect to Hubris, the build badge was, in turns out, pointing to a stale workflow. (That is, the build was succeeding, but the build badge was busted.) This comment has been immortalized in the fix.[0]With respect to Humility, I am going to resist the temptation of pointing out why one of those directories has a different nomenclature with respect to its delimiter -- and just leave it at this: if you really want to find some filthy code in Humility, you can do much, much better than that![0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;hubris&#x2F;commit&#x2F;651a9546b20ce19ce96d22446feba7c3bc41e963">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;hubris&#x2F;commit&#x2F;651a9546b20ce...</a>

Is that the same extremely high-quality open-source code that currently has a failing build?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;hubris">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;hubris</a>And, that one underscore-delimited folder name in this repo just catches the eye, huh?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;humility">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;humility</a>

I&#x27;d like to add that their open source code is also EXTREMELY high quality. If you&#x27;re an embedded developer go take a look at Hubris and Humility. I ended up using those to GREAT effect for this custom one-off aerospace device and it was a fantastic experience to integrate with. Definitely a change from what I was used to that took a bit of getting used to.

Nice to have been able to put a real life face to a name I&#x27;ve seen for so long!

Thanks for stopping by! All Things Open is one of my favorite conferences, glad we were able to be there.And yeah it&#x27;s totally chill: this product is not for everyone. No slight taken!

I met a couple of their folks on site last week in Raleigh at the All Things Open conference. Saw a couple quick demos, and... it&#x27;s not for me. But I can see the benefits, and many other folks stopping by the booth seemed to get the benefits as well. The folks at the booth were really nice too. Granted, that&#x27;s sort of your job when being in a vendor booth at a conference, but it&#x27;s surprising how often that&#x27;s not the case (booths staffed by people who don&#x27;t know the product, or are simply indifferent to the company, etc).EDIT: &quot;it&#x27;s not for me&quot; - I&#x27;m not working with organizations that have that sort of need directly. Re-reading that phrase, it came across as a bit dismissive of what they&#x27;ve built (which is undoubtedly impressive).

This is beautiful, Apple kind of elegant but the guys taking care of server racks are not the same crowd as those into Typescript&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;Go I guess?But yes, if multiple teams and they have direct access this rack to provision VMs, maybe yes.Also - as a developer you don&#x27;t provision VMs on daily basis. You start a project, you need those resources at the very outset and that&#x27;s about it?

That it&#x27;s a turnkey, vertically integrated and open platform with everything included. Seems big enough differentiator for me. It&#x27;s like going to going to a restaurant with table service vs a BYOB pizza shop.

I believe-as a few other commenters have pointed out and you allude to, the advantage is that it can be configured and operated like a massive set of cloud VM’s. There’s monitoring, provisioning, network, etc etc all setup and fully integrated.I imagine colo’s have something like this, but I _suspect_ operationally it’s a lot more powerful, easy to use and functionally closer to the API’s and behaviour users are used to on current cloud providers.Now, if someone who actually knows for sure feels like chiming in, I’m happy to be corrected.

It is the combination of things. Full FOSS stack, only cables being power and networking, and it being AIO package instead of conventional server rack.

&gt; The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented.How is this different than colo space that has been predominant for years? Perhaps simply that it can be purchased more easily and standardized like a typical cloud VM?

Because they can&#x27;t. Their product currently has zero GPU compute.

I love they do not mention &quot;AI&quot; in the article.

Do they raise those sorts of numbers in series A, though? Other comments in this thread seem to suggest they&#x27;ve raised a surprisingly large amount of money for such an early stage of the typical fundraising process. If it is atypically high it would make sense to me—it&#x27;s hardware which requires more up-front capital, and it&#x27;s a rockstar team so I understand why investors would have confidence in them—but from what little I know about fundraising it does seem remarkable to me.

People raise those sorts of numbers for web apps all the time.  It actually doesn’t sound that big for such a broad hardware and software company with long and high touch sales cycles ahead of them.

Huge fan of the people behind Oxide as well as the concept behind the product. Can someone tell a layman like myself where a 44M Series A funding round lands among other Series A rounds? I was at a startup during 2021 and when we raised 25M, it was a big deal for us and seemingly huge. Compared to that 44M is insane. Is this notably high or is my frame of reference just small? Either way, I really look forward to seeing Oxide&#x27;s progress going forward.It&#x27;s a company run by people who care and have cared for a long time, and they have all my faith.

Yeah, I read ... just &quot;wow&quot;. I hoped something more affordable, or even something more flexible like &quot;you get the full rack, but you are enabled to use only x % of the capacity for a lower entry price&quot;.

Like too much the idea.If they manage to do get an IBM mainframe level after-sales support, they will rock.Does someone know how much the lowest level box costs?

The Cloud Computer