Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company | Hacker News Reader

Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company

steveklabnik.com

65 pointssteveklabnik24 comments

As a mere mortal, I am more interested in their podcast than their products. :) Hopefully, they will produce more episodes in the future: https://oxide.computer/podcast/

Can someone provide on ELI5 for what this company does and how it's different? I get that its goal is to allow folks to buy instead of rent their hardware, but how is it different from the old days of buying servers? Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? Or am I just totally missing this?

So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc

> Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase?

I think "quality" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers.

I will have to delegate the details to the above talk; I have a bunch of work to get started on, and would just end up re-typing out what it says above, ha!

It seems that video has been posted to HN twice, but didn't attract any comments either time, sadly.

I don't have the energy to watch a 90 minute talk, but some skipping around finds a bit more detail about what is in the plan:

https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?t=1299

The theme seems to be giving the operator of the computer a lot more control - eliminating opaque binary blobs, exposing the hardware more directly, etc. I can't tell if this is a particular bee in the founders' bonnets, or a real market demand, or if they know about some scary threat they can't talk about.

Whilst this is definitely cool, and something that will get a lot of people on HN super pumped, it doesn't sound like something any company i have worked at would really care about. Unless these machines also deliver significantly better performance. But then, those companies were not hyperscalers.

My personal take on this bit is that it's not something that customers care about directly, but impedes overall quality, which they do care about. We'll just see how it all goes, of course!

Just FYI, in trying to sign up for the email list on your website, I got this error in one attempt:

There are errors below (email address) Too many subscribe attempts for this email address. Please try again in about 5 minutes.

Hey! Thanks for the heads up, can you email Jess [at] oxide [dot] computer and I will add you and try to figure it out! Thanks!

Do I understand correctly that the software layer of Oxide's product will be a hypervisor running VMs with hardware virtualization? If so, that's super surprising to hear from @bcantrill, considering how many talks he gave about running containers without VMs.

It is a bit too early to get into details like this, to be honest. It'll all become more clear publicly as more work gets done :)

Here us how I understood this and Steve's post was actually more helpful in this than previous announcements.

Big cloud and infra companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook) have the resources to build computers, customized for the work in the cloud on the cheap. As a company that is not one of them, you can either buy their cloud offering (paying hefty premium) or choose to build your infra yourself, using run-of-the-mill Dell servers or the like, but then all these customizations will not be available to you or will not be available for the reasonable price.

Oxide is the company that wants to offer servers customized for cloud work to everyone. Whether they will actually ship it to you for you to install in your DC or they will have their own DC - remains to be seen.

The blog post:

> what Oxide is doing is building computers that are suitable for hyperscalers, but selling them, rather than building another public cloud. These computers will have hardware and software designed together to create excellent systems.

Their website:

> We are building a new kind of server. True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.

A puff piece [1]:

> Oxide's mission is to create a server using standard x86 processors from companies like Intel or AMD that strips away a lot of the extraneous software that ships with a mainstream server, giving customers a "clean sheet" designed for their operating system, infrastructure, and application requirements. [...] computers for which the software and hardware were designed in concert tend to deliver better performance and reliability than all-purpose off-the-rack servers [...] Those retail servers are still designed as one-size-fits-all boxes that must accommodate all of the ways a potential customer might use those servers, which means they ship with a lot of extraneous firmware. "What we're cleaning up throughout the bottom of the stack just makes it all run better and [makes it] more debuggable," said Frazelle, the startup's chief product officer.

I think i understand what they are offering - hardware that is better for building private clouds on - but not how they plan to deliver it. After all, they aren't making their own CPUs, drives, or RAM, are they? They get to design the motherboard, firmware, and enclosure - anything else? They must think there's enough juice there to be able to outweigh the brand value and economies of scale that Dell, HPE, etc have.

[1] https://www.protocol.com/oxide-computer-cloud-server

I'm really curious as to what Oxide's plans are who are they selling servers to – individuals or companies? Is the plan to build your own data center or is it to throw a few of their servers in a collocated spot? Who is the competition, cloud providers, VMWare, something else?

Anyways, good luck at your new job it sounds really exciting!

Even though I am an employee of a so-called “hyper-scale” cloud vendor, I really am rooting for Oxide. There are actually a lot of hard problems in this space, and Oxide are inherently more agile than a big cloud vendor. As long as they focus on problems that aren’t enormous monetary black holes (which I’m assuming would end Oxide), they are making the world a better place. Also very much appreciate the podcast.

@steveklabnik: Just out of curiosity, did it not work out at Cloudflare? Seems like a rather short stint.

Still on very good terms with Cloudflare. It was just over a year. I am just extremely excited about what Oxide is up to, and wanted to get in on the ground floor. I wasn't actually planning on leaving Cloudflare, just sometimes, opportunities come up and you have to take them. Or at least, in this instance, I decided I wanted to take it.

Wow, congrats!

404

resolves for me by now

I recently re-did my website, and it is a bit fragile in places. Should be all good now!

(I can't wait until Notion releases an official API...)

Yeah, the waiting is killing me.

I'm not interested in the incessant self promotion of a single individual.

What software products have you written from scratch?

Or are you mostly talking and keeping your name in the press.

Why is "from scratch" the determinant of a good engineer? That's a tiny portion of the work, and only a single component of an individual's contribution.

Obviously if you are not writing your programs in binary by manually magnetizing a hard drive, you are not a _real_ engineer.

I personally only use CPUs that I have hand made from the organic metals mined in my backyard.

I cant stop laughing!!! I may die soon! Awesome reply!

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