Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankfrank13 | Hacker News Reader

I am constantly impressed by Oxide. Their writing is top notch, I think they're exceptional engineers and product thinkers, and clearly they care about the ecosystem they inhabit.

One day I would love to get all of their OSS up and running locally. Truly, why not try to run your own private cloud? How many old laptops, desktops, PIs, etc must we all have lying around?

View on HN

People have been setting up servers since they've had internet connections, it's only the last few years that people started calling everything "the cloud" and acting like having a physical server on the internet is difficult or strange.

I don't know what old laptops and PIs have to do with anything though, one $600 desktop is going to dwarf all of them combined in performance. There is no reason for anyone to do that unless they are a kid with only an allowance for income.

Yeah, a lot of us that are a touch older learned a lot of unix/linux fundamentals from running our own server in our closet, low upload bandwidth of DSL be damned.

One honest question for all people who miss the "good old days" of on-prem: have you ever worked in a shop that ran their own private datacenter? because I did and it wasn't lovely.

My first job ran their own datacenter. We started with a rack of about 50 nodes and some odd computers here and there. By the time I left we had a rack of 250 nodes and we had thrown away all individual servers (oh Solaris I won't miss you).

> Truly, why not try to run your own private cloud? How many old laptops, desktops, PIs, etc must we all have lying around?

Although VMs and Containers have done a world of difference on running your own datacenter, there are still reasons why just use the hardware that you have lying around for a business is a bad idea.

First, random laptops and desktops don't have a good ratio of price, performance, and energy consumption. Second, despite virtualization, all this heterogeneity in hardware and software is bound to cause an ongoing maintenance headache. Third, I hope your business doesn't have a sudden spike of demand, or you'll be struggling to find hardware to support it. Fourth, say good bye to quick iteration and experimentation when you have huge lead times and tons of capex.

Bottom line, cool for a hobbyist project, not cool for starting a business (and a maybe for a well establish and mature business).

> why not try to run your own private cloud?

Because until you're big enough to have local weather systems evolving inside your offices, that's called 'servers'. I'm not saying not to do it, it's great, and cost effective, and much safer, but calling a small-to-mid business's servers 'cloud' is like saying I have a 'private Uber' in my garage that I can drive myself.

Right or wrong, I think the notion of "the cloud" that Oxide is selling is the "elastic" part--the ability to request resources by quantity instead of having to think about the exact servers responsible for serving your request. So physical servers become an implementation detail rather than a developer concern. That's a concept that can apply to how you provision two on-site servers (or even one, really) as much as a whole multi-data-center cloud computing service.

People have been doing that for 10+ years solid, even more with rudimentary middleware such as grid computing.

I don't think Oxide is trying to say no one's done this before, more that they're the best and most comprehensive offering to buy an onsite setup for this fully set up from a third party.

That is correct, yeah. Like every company and product, we do think that we are doing something special, but we'd never claim that nobody has done something like this before. Heck, a lot of the choices that we're making have come out of personal experiences of the founders doing that sort of work previously, as well as hyperscalers talking publicly about the choices they've made internally. We build on the shoulders of giants, just like everyone else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com