The Cloud Computer

This is actually a pretty big deal.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ironically this looks like the realization of Richard Stallman&#x27;s dream where users can help each other if something doesn&#x27;t work.

I am CTO of a large global data center provider posting with throwaway account.<p>As a technologist, I really appreciate what they have done. Impressive work, high quality, however I don&#x27;t understand who this is for.<p>The meaningful market for Data Center hardware is pretty well defined in two clusters. People that build&#x2F;make custom gear (such as Hyperscalers) and people that buys HP&#x2F;Cisco&#x2F;IBM&#x2F;Dell... (blades or hyper-converged). To scale, you obviously want your DCs as standardized as possible.<p>Until this company has a certain&#x2F;size and scale, no one serious will trust their black boxes at any type of scale.<p>Beyond the tech, how would support services really work? We can have a technician from any of the large vendors on-site in less than 2 hours. In some of our DC clusters we actually have vendor support personnel 24x7 on-site with vendor paid spare parts inventory. How would they provide that level of service?<p>Maybe I am not the target audience for this offering.

I have been following oxide for a bit, and really don&#x27;t have to add to the tech conversation, but do want to say:<p>Congrats to the team on reaching this big milestone and (in my eyes at least) just as much congratulations on doing it in a way that has been unique and sticking to values that seems to drive a strong positive culture (at least from the outside looking in).<p>Shipping products is <i>hard</i>, and only getting harder. IMHO, one of the big drivers of that is just how complex every market has became. Building and selling software alone is so much more multi-disciplinary than it was 10 years ago and adding hardware to the mix is upping that by a huge factor. As I look around, I see so many companies struggle to build teams that can handle the huge range of required tasks. To see a company like Oxide that (once again, from the outside a least) seems to have things together on so many fronts, especially while doing it while sticking strongly to some core values, is pretty inspiring.<p>Not to get overly cynical, but I don&#x27;t think it is an extreme opinion to say that current start-up culture feels like you have to make big compromises in what you believe in order to be successful. Whether that be open-source, how you value and pay employees, or even just rushing things to deliver that aren&#x27;t ready.<p>While I acknowledge Oxide has some well-connected, experienced founders that I am certain enabled them to get the resources and trust to do things their way, I really hope they kill it so that other founders and builders can learn that you still can build not just financially successful products, but great organizations that truly care about their values.

I&#x27;ve been following Oxide since they formed and I really hope they crush it.<p>Semi-sort-of related... there was an automation company, Bedrock automation, that went defunct about a year ago. Their PLC hardware ideas were dope but I always felt like they were missing the boat a little bit by supporting stale PLC programming languages. I used to wonder if supporting Rust and Ada on these PLC&#x27;s would be been a good idea to diversify&#x2F;specialize into complex control system domains. Also, iirc, Bedrock didn&#x27;t support EtherCAT which I felt was a mistake.<p>Anyhow... one of these days it would be cool for a forward thinking company like Oxide to tackle what a modern complex, distributed control system hardware&#x2F;software stack should look like using Rust&#x2F;Hubris.

I really wish oxide had a Homelab&#x2F;consumer centric offering!<p>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.<p>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.

&quot;Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location.&quot;[1]<p>Do they actually assemble and build their own racks of hardware, or is that outsourced? Somewhere, there must be an assembly plant. If this stuff actually exists. It&#x27;s hard to even find pictures of their products. Do they have production installations?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;careers</a>

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.<p><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>

What am I missing here? Hasn&#x27;t SoftIron been building this exact thing for around 5 years? Heck, they design and manufacture all of the hardware as well.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softiron.com&#x2F;hypercloud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softiron.com&#x2F;hypercloud&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softiron.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;run-bmc-why-we-decided-to-build-our-own-baseboard-management-controller&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softiron.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;run-bmc-why-we-decided-to-build-ou...</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.

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?

It bugs me more than it should that they flirt with hexadecimal numbers in their branding with the whole 0x thing, but the logo is 0xide when clearly it ought to be 0x1de. Designer came up with a clever idea but didn&#x27;t understand hexadecimal, and no one had the heart to tell them? :o)<p>I&#x27;m kidding, mostly. The engineer in me is bothered by it, but the part of my brain that cares more about design and branding understands that 0x1de would cause inconsistencies in the branding elsewhere. (E.g. 0xDocs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oxide.computer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oxide.computer</a>)

I know that many might have by now forgotten how an actual data center works.<p>&quot;One size fits all&quot; will never work.<p>Here are the main headaches that someone who actually runs a data center will run into:<p>- How many power circuits does the DC provide you? What voltage? AC or DC?<p>- How many amps do the circuits have? Is the PDU provided by the DC, or do you provide it?<p>- How many upstreams will you have? Dual core routers? BGP? Static routing? Failover?<p>- Upstream provided via Fiber? Copper?<p>- Given that for the last couple of years being able to re-buy a typical server model (say: Supermicro), CPU, Storage for more than a couple of weeks has been a challenge, and given that rack hardware is supposed to run for years - how can I be sure to be able to scale?<p>- What happens if that Oxide startup goes bust 6 months from now?<p>- Would any sane DC operator really buy &quot;we just built our own switch&quot;? I wouldn&#x27;t. Those who have been in that business for 20 years still f*ck it up on a regular basis. I want a proven vendor for my mission critical stuff.<p>I am sorry, I don&#x27;t see them addressing ANY of the real life pain points you have operating your own rack. Unless they ship a couple of data center engineers within the box.<p>The whole cloud stuff is simply designed for managers who believe that in a job market where it&#x27;s hard to find DC&#x2F;server engineers that things will be magically done in the background. With this, it&#x27;s worse - it&#x27;s pretended that &quot;stuff just works&quot; if you ship it in a single box. And that&#x27;s simply not a case. A DC installation not constantly maintained by skilled engineer will go down in flames within months, one way or another.

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).<p>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).

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

I follow a person on Github who works here! (cbiffle[0]) They wrote a fantastic series[1] on learning Rust from a C perspective and I highly recommend it.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cbiffle">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cbiffle</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cliffle.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;dangerust&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cliffle.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;dangerust&#x2F;</a>

&gt; We’re really excited to have the first commercial cloud computer — and for it to be generally available! If you yourself are interested, we look forward to it making its first impression on you — reach out to us!<p>Can we please stop with the &quot;the only way to get our pricing is by booking a sales call with us.&quot; This is a 100% surefire way for me to never pay for your product, and instead go to competitors who provide straightforward, no-nonsense pricing on the website.<p>This is ironic given the amount of self-praise they give themselves in this article about how much they care about shipping something you can buy once instead of renting from the traditional cloud. Great, so then tell me how much it costs...

I have to say, as someone who will never buy one of these, I just want to see pictures of all the cool features they are talking about. And yet, their website seems strangely devoid of product photos! Or I have been unable to find them.<p>I worked photojournalism in university, and it really strikes me when people talk about how cool their novel interconnect is and how clean the design is, but their long writeup doesn&#x27;t feature any pictures?? Would love to see what it looks like.

&gt; &quot;Today we are announcing the general availability of the <i>WORLD&#x27;S FIRST</i> commercial cloud computer&quot;<p>(emphasis mine)<p>I&#x27;m having a hard time getting past the first sentence of this blog post.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m missing the obvious.

Kick ass project, been following bcantril since before Joyent and as a (server&#x2F;infra + sysadmin nerd this really hits home): Are there plans to build some public-cloud-esque software add-ons to offer cloud-native equivalents to s3, serverless-functions, message queues, etc?<p>I feel like the &quot;running your own datacenter&quot; complexity of on prem is a big part of why companies go to the cloud in the first place - but that a good amount of cloud lock-in is actually in the software&#x2F;service stack and reliance on it. I know there is a competent open source option for most of these services (and in fact most are repackaged open source software...), but they do seem pretty disparate and require quite a fair bit of knowledge and expertise to deploy and run at scale.<p>Secondary question in the same thread: What about &quot;accounting&quot;? Running infrastructure at large-scale companies (such that would look at a rack-level solution) usually entails budgeting and accounting of resources - how does oxide simplify this for infrastructure ops trying to keep the various IT consumers honest?

I really like the company name! It&#x27;s like hexadecimal notation with IDE!<p>It&#x27;s high time the datacenter takes a more holistic approach. For years I have been thinking that it&#x27;s silly to stick a bunch of tiny fans in individual servers when one large impeller pulling air from an inclosed rack would be more efficient. Imagine large fans with ducts that come down to each rack or row of racks. Current in == current out; so a large diameter fan (5 feet) coupling down to small hose (10 inch) means the air moving through the small end will be really moving fast through those components!

The irony is that Oxide caters to the HN crowd, but the HN crowd would <i>not</i> be the buyer of their offerings.<p>Old school CIO&#x27;s, who make enterprise decisions without developer support, are typically the buyer of hyper-converged infrastructure (or Utility companies who struggle with CapEx vs OpEd).<p>I wish them luck. There&#x27;s a bunch really good folks over there.

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.<p>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?

“Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.”<p>My dad, who worked for IBM through the 90s and 00s always points out how amusing this is. We started with the cloud. Then went PCs. Then are going cloud again.<p>Doesn’t mean this is wrong. It’s just amusing.<p>If we do it properly, it should be far more optimal than all the local computers not doing anything most of the day.

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.<p>It&#x27;s a company run by people who care and have cared for a long time, and they have all my faith.

Congrats, Bryan and team! I&#x27;ve been following your evolution for a while now. People might just look at it and say &quot;It&#x27;s just a rack of CPUs and storage.&quot; And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them (or at least flame them in online posts).<p>Over the decades the separation between &quot;software&quot; people and &quot;hardware&quot; people has grown. With &quot;cloud&quot; people have grown comfortable papering over poor basic performance by abstracting away even your visibility into how a system is running. &quot;You don&#x27;t need to worry about that! It&#x27;s ~serverless~.&quot; But you&#x27;ll worry when that bill comes due at the end of the month.<p>With systems like Oxide, you are allowing users to once again actually see what they get, and ensure they get what they paid for, from a high-end cloud server.<p>It should be putting other systems providers on-notice that the days of flaky, non-performant, and poorly-integrated components are behind us. People want <i>beasts</i> from their servers.<p>And software designers, this is also your wake-up call that you can&#x27;t just put lousy-performing software with poor CPU utilization and memory hogging on big metal and hope that it&#x27;s &quot;good enough.&quot; You really need to design your software to run ~efficiently~ in such systems.

&gt; The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented.<p>This 100%!<p>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

As it appears Intel Capital is one of their Series A investors, I wonder if this has some bearing on the chances that there could also be an Intel CPU-based Oxide rack (or maybe individual sleds?) in the future.<p>It seems that Oxide&#x27;s product is rather tied to AMD&#x27;s CPU offerings for the time being (which perhaps will serve them very well for now), and given what they&#x27;ve accomplished so far, I imagine it would take quite a bit of effort on the platform initialization side (and other lower level stuff) to get things working with Intel CPUs instead. Surely the ability to have vendor diversity for many of their components should be an advantage for Oxide (and their customers downstream as well), so maybe there&#x27;s something to think about there. Of course, this is all interesting only once Intel actually gets competitive again on the datacenter CPU side of things, where they seem to have really dropped the ball in recent years.<p>On the other hand, their networking switch hardware uses Intel components (Tofino), so maybe that&#x27;ll be the extent of Intel&#x27;s integration in their rack for the foreseeable future?

I love they do <i>not</i> mention &quot;AI&quot; in the article.

I&#x27;m very skeptical on this despite so much praise yet no-one has used it.<p>It seems the only reason why people are getting too excited is because of the team members and the name.<p>What if this venture becomes yet another VC pump and acquire scam to get you to purchase a massive room heater?<p>They better not get themselves acquired like the rest of the hyped up VC scams out there.

This is too startup-y and niche and too small to attract enough companies on the market.<p>Best case this gets acquired by HP,IBM or Dell and will die out because talent will leave.<p>I know a 4bn&#x2F;y revenue company that could greatly benefit from this but they will never even consider buying from a company like this.

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.<p><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><p><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><p><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>

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.

They use Tofino as the networking switch. But Intel is discontinuing Tofino so I&#x27;m wondering what does future upgrade path look like for Oxide? Would they consider something like a p4 programmable DPU as the replacement?

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).

I see lots of comments debating this technology choice or that one, as if the economic buyer actually cares. I dont think they do as much as the HN commentariat might think.<p>All that really matters is whether Oxide&#x27;s guesses about who&#x27;ll buy and what they&#x27;ll pay are right.<p>Lets say that Oxide are guessing that their lead customers are telco and oil&#x2F;gas: conservative industries, regulated, very strict about uptime and data sovereignty, etc. Oxide might spend 1 to 2 years running the gamut of all the people in those types of customers that can say no: ops, swcurity, network teams etc. But if Oxide can reach the finance team and get them to believe that a one time chunk of $$ is better than opex in the current interest rate environment, them it really doesnt matter what the tech stack is. (And bear in mind that financial models are f(t) so things might turn upside down as the economic picture changes over time)<p>Assuming they have done this math, (surely a yes, or else VCs would not be lending them money) Oxide must need sufficent funding for a long sales cycle, and plausible enough bench strength to support customers who are going to hold them to ruthless SLAs and penalty clauses. All of that take serious coin up front, eg theres no outsourcing your 24x7 support to some kid reading from a script.

There&#x27;s a fundamental misunderstanding of what The Cloud is that seems to pervade discussions like this. Too many technical people don&#x27;t understand what they&#x27;re looking at.<p>The Cloud is not &quot;a computer&quot;. The Cloud is a public utility. You don&#x27;t rent the transformers at an electric utility company - because why the hell would you? It&#x27;s just one component of a much larger system that is valueless to the consumer without all the other components.<p>What these people are selling is more like a battery that you can purchase that plugs into the electric grid. But why would you want to purchase a battery? It degrades over time, losing value, and eventually needs to be recycled, and somebody has to deal with all that. Renting is the perfect way to push all of that time-consuming and complex maintenance out to someone else who can lower cost with volume.<p>The idea that renting servers is not sustainable would suggest that somehow computers are not like housing, cars, shop vacs, or any of the million other things you can rent. A computer is an expensive commodity like any other, and renting makes perfect sense a lot of the time.<p>If you need to purchase, for economic, load, tax, regulatory, or other reasons, there are already ready-made computers with (or without) service contracts and supported OSes that can be plopped into any colo, and colos sell dedicated machines already. This pitch doesn&#x27;t include anything new other than buzzwords. Yeah I&#x27;m sure they did a bunch of engineering - that nobody will ever need. I&#x27;m calling shenanigans.

Didn&#x27;t Sun Microsystems used to do this? Sell servers in shipping crates?<p>Didn&#x27;t that still come with the weeks of overhead that compelled people to adopt cloud in the first place?

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?

Couple questions:<p>1. Are there integrator companies that take these building blocks and build datacenters for other companies?<p>2. Are these racks intended to be bought in large quantities and put into new datacenters?<p>3. Is liquid cooling an option?<p>4. Do you sell datacenters as well as just the racks? Do you have any of your own datacenters built out?<p>5. Tough question: if these are so competitive and good for your customers, why aren&#x27;t you also making lots of them for yourself and also selling cloud compute?

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Without the high level managed stuff we would be off cloud five minutes from now.<p>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.

Dumb question: How is Oxide different than AWS Outposts or Azure Stack HCI?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;mediahandler&#x2F;files&#x2F;resourcefiles&#x2F;azure-arc-infographic&#x2F;Azure_Arc_Infographic.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;mediahandler&#x2F;files&#x2F;resourcefiles...</a>

Can someone clue a greenhorn like me in on why this is a big deal vs prior dedicated storage providers like Hetzner etc?

I really appreciate the vision and the technology (also the dedication to opensource).<p>The difficulty is that HP&#x2F;Dell&#x2F;NetApp&#x2F;etc are well established and maybe if you&#x27;re a SME you can appreciate the benefits of an end to end integrated solution but most of the people making purchasing decisions largely don&#x27;t. It&#x27;s easy to market on CapEx but difficult to market on OpEx - you&#x27;re asking customers to (likely) pay more for a similar performance invariably less featureful solution from a small company which they&#x27;re then locked into largely leaning on the promise it&#x27;ll be easier to operate (where is your GPU integration, object storage, shared filesystem, integrated kubernetes, etc). They then have to convince all the incumbent software vendors to support their software (e.g SAP&#x2F;oracle&#x2F;etc) on this specialized hardware.

To people who agree with the stated premise: &quot;Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure&quot;<p>Do you think people want to design games with unreal engine on the cloud? Is there no desktop application that&#x27;s safe? I don&#x27;t fully accept this premise and I wonder if I&#x27;m the crazy one sometimes.

That website is interesting. Maybe it&#x27;s a Firefox bug, but when I load the page with NoScript on, the text is very weird, like this:<p>&gt; TODay WE aRE aNNOUNCING tHe<p>It&#x27;s actually <i>much weirder</i> than that, as some of the capitals in my quote are actually big lowercase letters, not capitals (i.e. the opposite of smallcaps).

Congrats to the Oxide team. I&#x27;m not a potential customer but still get a thrill from the open source projects from these folks.<p>My favorite is the automated CIO repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;cio">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;oxidecomputer&#x2F;cio</a>

Wow! Congratulations! I&#x27;ve been following you guys for a while and have loved what you&#x27;ve been doing. Really want to get my hands on some of this hardware to play with.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a video exploring the rack and showing the first time setup.

They say this:<p>&gt; While the software is an essential part of the Oxide cloud computer, what we sell is in fact the computer. As a champion of open source, this allows Oxide a particularly straightforward open source strategy: our software is all open.<p>But their homepage says this:<p>&gt; As soon as power is applied to an Oxide rack, our purpose-built hardware root of trust – present on every Oxide server and switch – cryptographically validates that its own firmware is genuine and unmodified.<p>That sounds like tivoization to me. The value of their software being open source is heavily diminished by their hardware refusing to run anything but their &quot;genuine and unmodified&quot; software.

Reminds of what they worked on before at Sun ZFS storage appliance.<p>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 ???.

Brian Cantrill is a legend. We&#x27;re gonna need a sequel to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4</a>. Very happy to see them ship.

Has anybody else used Rust for embedded?<p>Would be interested to hear your experience.<p>So far, I’ve seen mixed reviews. Some say that you can end up using unsafe a lot and so it’s better to stick with C or even use Zig.<p>Wondered if there was any merit to this.

They seem to be cagey about their networking. Nothing besides vague &quot;100GbE to the switch&quot;. Is this some home-brew asic or fpga? What offloads does it support? Is the driver upstream?

When Hewlett-Packard released a similar product (rack-integrated compute), it was hard to tell if the backplane bandwidth killed it or the terrible Java management software killed it. It looks like this has a better design for each.<p>There doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to provision a bare metal operating system, so HPC is out, and the networking is previous-generation, so there are two opportunities for progress right there.<p>Now that they&#x27;re VC-funded I expect an OEM to snap them up before either opportunity can be pursued.

Wow, they’ve raised a total of $78 million, and they’re only Series A!<p>I remember a time when a Series A was rarely above $10m. Feels like at that capital level they should be further into the alphabet.

Canonical did something similar back in 2014 but mostly for demo purposes with &quot;Orange Box&quot;: the promise was that you could easily do it with any available hardware.

Anyone recall Egenera? Compute only, virtualization, and fault-tolerance with the Ferrari of servers only MAANG-equivalents could afford in small numbers.<p>[PDF] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20050325213243&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.egenera.com&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;www_BladeFrame_Brochure_042704.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20050325213243&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.egener...</a>

Since bhyve can&#x27;t do nested virtualization, i guess they can&#x27;t &quot;dog food&quot; the platform during development. I wonder if for that they use Linux.<p>The same hardware and software using kvm would be much more appealing. Not being able to run nested virt or GPUs on such a powerful and expensive rack is pretty brutal. Perhaps that is planned for the future though.

Next, I form a company that rents out time on an Oxide rack...

Sooo basically it&#x27;s an OSS version of Egenera&#x27;s BladeFrame or VCE&#x27;s vBlock.<p>It&#x27;s going to be tough sledding getting these into enterprise accounts.<p>Best of luck.

I feel like this company misses the point of cloud computing. Its mostly cost elasticity, not where your servers are physically located.<p>This feels like the rackspace approach

As a HPC guy, I really like the idea of one or two of these racks serving as the cluster front end, providing the login nodes, controllers, etc. You would still need generic servers for the main bulk of the compute for density and cost reasons, but it would basically make the back-end part of the cluster into an interchangeable blob of cores, allowing us to focus on the interesting bits of running a service.

I think I&#x27;m missing something here. Do they sell servers or are they selling some interesting service where you can buy a server AND they physically host the machine in their own data centers? If the former, what value add do they provide over IBM&#x2F;SuperMicro&#x2F;[INSERT COMPUTER COMPANY HERE]? The custom OS? You could get 99% of the way there with bare-metal Kubernetes.

I haven&#x27;t listened to Oxide &amp; Friends, but I absolutely love On The Metal. The guests are eminent and extremely interesting, the hosts are passionate and fun, and there&#x27;s always a wonderful chemistry among the hardware geeks on the show that just makes me so excited to get into hardware and see what the future brings for us. Highly recommended.

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?<p>But yes, if multiple teams and they have direct access this rack to provision VMs, maybe yes.<p>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&#x27;s an interesting juxtaposition to Microsoft&#x27;s move to &quot;cloud computer&quot; which is a thin client with everything (including the OS) streaming from the cloud.<p>Or maybe it&#x27;ll be a curious unintended match instead, with whatever &quot;streaming&quot; devices Microsoft pushes next being connected to one&#x27;s own &quot;cloud computer&quot; instead...

People that shun engineered systems generally don&#x27;t understand the value. Have probably never experienced it for themselves.

I hate websites that aren&#x27;t transparent about pricing. Like, how much is this crap going to cost? What are they offering exactly? I hate having to speak to some normie in sales just to get access to something. I swear - with how hard it is to buy from some of these companies its a wonder that they sell anything at all.

I definitely want to know more on their Kubernetes, this a software not designed for on-prem so i’m curious on their stack choice

I am supper impressed with how well-rounded they are. Wherever you look from git repo to the website and everything in between.

How do you think this will affect companies building single-tenant apps?<p>I can imagine SaaS businesses offering their product as a &quot;box&quot;: making on-prem significantly easier. Deliver your software along with the hardware, hook it into their network.<p>Done.<p>Anyone with more experience have thoughts on if this will potentially become a common option for SaaS?

How can I build something for the Oxide Cloud Computer as a developer? Will there be something to simulate the APIs and so on?<p>Similar hardware for home labs and for personal computers with open firmware would be great. I&#x27;d also love to see servers with hardware which can be upgraded (rather than completely recycled).

What&#x27;s the interface point by which I can utilise this &quot;cloud&quot; - is it providing an AWS like API, is it something standard I can tap into so I&#x27;m not &quot;locked&quot; into this just as much as I am my cloud vendor? Or is it all in on Kubernetes and I have to use that?

Now I only wonder if it makes sense to install a SLURM HPC cluster on one, and how much hassle that would be?

Am I the only one who&#x27;s confused by the offering? Are they selling cloud hosting or servers?

&gt; The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented.<p>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?

Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but it seems like these guys just reinvented mainframes.

Regardless of how good the product is, are companies really going to trust a startup with 100% of their hardware, software and support dependencies with no outside ecosystem and no interoperability with any of their existing infra?

With the rack being so quiet, I wonder if they would ever sell these in smaller versions for more local installations. Would be pretty niche, but it would be interesting. Same kinds of markets that ui.com tries to serve.

Without JS this site&#x27;s text is a weird mix of upper and lower case letters, even within the same word. Even large lowercase mixed in. The underlying text is perfectly normal. Can any web devs suggest why this is? TIA

Oh. I get what this is. It&#x27;s a &quot;cloud&quot; mainframe. They&#x27;re trying to be the Apple of mainframes.<p>Reinvent OpenStack, slap it on some 8Us and storage arrays, shove it in a rack, and ship it to a colo with a professional installer. So basically one of the larger server vendors but with integrated &quot;cloud&quot; software, minus the 2-hour service turnaround and spare parts.<p>The fact that they&#x27;re writing the software from scratch is going to add years of lead time until they reach parity with other solutions. My guess is they&#x27;re hoping they can get sticker price or TCO low enough that it outweighs the lack of functionality and uncertainty of a brand new <i>everything</i>. If you just need some VMs in a lab in the office closet, might work.<p>They only have $44M to build that company? I hope the next funding round is better :&#x2F;

As a long time follower from the first &quot;On the metal&quot; podcast and as someone who has been cheering for you silently from the sidelines - Congratulations!<p>You all have arrived. Wishing you decades of prosperity and good fortune.

I might be missing something, but I thought the whole point of cloud was to get rid of on prem setups.<p>If users wanted to save some money, why not just implement a hybrid cloud system?

For someone who&#x27;s not familiar with what you get from AWS, this appears to be similar, on the surface anyway. Can someone explain how it&#x27;s different?

The Apple of Servers cloud. Fully vertically integrated.

Will Oxide build a GPU rack as well? Asking for a friend.

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

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

I was reading until I saw green and some type of rack looking thing, wait I thought it was not a rack! seriously, great job. let me own it first.

I have been waiting for this for a while. Their OSS code is of the highest quality and I&#x27;m hoping the hardware is at the same level!

I can&#x27;t read the dark theme for more than a couple of minutes without a headache and eye strain starting up.

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

This looks really interesting, but please can we get some idea of the prices involved without needing to contact sales teams ?

“The cloud” has been a buzzword for twenty years but I feel like it’s finally taking shape. This is promising.

&gt; Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.<p>I absolutely dread that future. I want all my computation back to be local, doesn&#x27;t matter to me if I own the cloud computer or not as long as I also don&#x27;t own the environment it is embedded in. If the connection to it isn&#x27;t mine and neither is its source of power then I don&#x27;t really control &quot;my&quot; cloud computer.

So what&#x27;s the use case for this? Can I buy this and start a hosting company?

I think it&#x27;s something like - shipping management software with bare metal ?

Can someone 0lease explain whatnis this and why do i need this?

Does anyone know if they plan to support bare metal machines in the future?

Congratulations Bryan and the Oxide team! Well done on your achievement.

feels a lot like those vblock &#x2F;converged infrastructure in a box things they used to push. Turnkey virtualization environment - I guess the advantage&#x2F;? here is a open source stack.

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

I discovered their podcast a month ago and binged through the backlog -- it&#x27;s one of the best technology podcasts of all time! Really like the way these folks think and communicate!

You know what&#x27;s cool? Pricing information.

Sounds like a reincarnation of the mainframe

No GPUs? I hope they have a plan for GPUs.

I want one. But what is the price?

IT is a fashion industry.

Not having a picture is criminal.

People who think cloud computing is the future of all things don&#x27;t understand where their chips come from.

Do they support GPU&#x27;s?

Congrats bcantrill, et al.

Do they have GPU&#x27;s?

the incarnation of what VBlock was supposed to be?

Shining beacon of hope.

just fooling around with their demo web console ..<p>&quot;A disk cannot be added or attached unless the instance is creating or stopped.&quot; &quot;A network interface cannot be created or edited unless the instance is stopped.&quot;<p>really?

Can someone 0lease explain what is this and why do i need this?

send one my way to evaluate for HPC workloads, thanks.

their whole &quot;AWS is bad because THEY are engaging in rentier capitalism, we are good because we sell you the tools to let YOU engage in rentier capitalism&quot; shtick rings empty to me

sustainability considerations?

Love it.

I regret missing the Open Source Firmware Conference--I really wanted to meet them and learn some more on what&#x27;s the story here.<p>I know it&#x27;s a brilliant team, and since ZFS&#x2F;OpenSolaris&#x2F;Dtrace I&#x27;ve known about Bryan. The product is a nicely looking product too. One thing I don&#x27;t get is the target market. Who is it? Banks? Cloud vendors? Insurance companies? I think there&#x27;s a part of the computer business that I don&#x27;t get yet.<p>One guy in one of the previous HN threads here said that it&#x27;s convenient to run 1 RFP for 1 box costing $1M-$2M vs running 30 RFPs for isolated components to put on the rack. Ok, I can see that. That&#x27;s some argument.<p>But I know that Supermicro has rack assembly service. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supermicro.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;rack" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supermicro.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;rack</a> and I&#x27;m sure Dells and HPEs have the same. Does it mean that it&#x27;s impossible to call them and tell them: &quot;Excuse me, I want 2 racks, 15 systems each, top of the line AMD CPU with RAM, NVMe storage, all maxed out, and whatever fastest Juniper switches you can find. Put me VMWare vFusion on it. Ship this thing to Infomart in Texas. I have $2M here with your name on it&quot;. They won&#x27;t do this for me?<p>Its either this, or Oxide is going to e.g.: Bank of America, and along with RFP the bank is asking: &quot;Show me complete supply chain records, including the source code to your boot loader, drivers, and any firmware that any component on this motherboard is running&quot;. And maybe that&#x27;s ... impossible these days?<p>I&#x27;m the startup CTO, so not the consumer base, but after DHH started posting his thing about cloud exit, I decided to explore this, and I walked the floor of 3 DCs (in SV&#x2F;TX). People who walk you around the DC don&#x27;t appear to care about cables, fans or noise etc. If it&#x27;s longer than 1hr on the floor, they&#x27;ll put Airpods in and they&#x27;re done. I&#x27;ve seen cages that look unified, pristine, with love and affection put into cable layout, and I&#x27;ve seen cages that look like a total mess. It&#x27;s your cage--you only go there if things break.<p>My last guess is that maybe Oxide rack will end up being sort of what an Apple Macbook is among cheap HP&#x2F;Acer laptops from Walmart. And it&#x27;ll be a shiny toy of bold bearded IT dudes who work for GEICO IT by day, but by night they scavenge eBay for used server deals and get excited about the idea of running their own private rack in their basement. They can&#x27;t afford it at home, but at work they&#x27;ll want their own Oxide. If you&#x27;re reading this, do know I know who you are.

are they selling something? can we buy it?? it&#x27;s anyone&#x27;s guess..

I think a lot of commenters here have little experience with hyper-converged infrastructure if they don&#x27;t see this is different. This looks, by far, the simplest way to run workloads outside of the big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).<p>It seems they only support up to virtual machines but this is still miles ahead of VMWare, Nutanix, or CISCO ACI to my eyes. This honestly looks simple enough that a developer&#x2F;DevOps team could manage it. With the other &#x27;hyperconverged&#x27; infrastructure offerings you will still need a dedicated team of trained ops professionals to manage it.

&gt; Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location.<p>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 always had a feeling that Bryan and people around kinda took the tech first approach and it never really came to a proper fruition. I think the ambition behind the engineering marvels they did over time was certainly bigger. Dtrace, Fishworks, Joyent, then this... so why is that? Perhaps the fierce refusal of joining the mainstream side (Linux)? Fingers crossed, but...

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

Sorry, but this is quite a bunch of b... IMHO.<p>Let&#x27;s start with their beliefs: 1. Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure.<p>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.<p>Which brings us to their belief no. 2: The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented.<p>If you buy a computer and run virtualized loads on it, then you&#x27;re not doing cloud computing. As simple as that.<p>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.