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Comment by vaylian | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to make sense of what this is. I don't get what the unique selling point is. I understand that this is about server hosting. And from context I gather that this is about Rust. It seems that special/custom hardware is involved. And they advocate for buying instead of renting servers. But I can't figure out more than that.

Who should be interested in this product? Does it make sense to compare this to AWS, Google Cloud or Azure?

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I don't understand why this exact comment is posted on every thread about them - it's not very complicated.

"Cloud computing" style systems are nice in some ways - you can just ask a computer to give you some virtual computers and virtual storage and it gives it to you. Whoever owns them can put quotas or pricing or whatever on you, but you can self-serve, and you don't have to care about replacing DIMMs or NVMe sticks or whatever.

Having some random American megacorp host things in a datacenter is good for some people, bad for others. You might not want to be in their legal jurisdiction, or you're legally not allowed to, or you just don't want to, or their prices for your volume are too high, or you don't want to be locked in to whatever future bad choices they make.

So, Oxide made racks of machines you can buy, plug in, and then have a cloud-style (virtual machine, virtual storage, virtual network) system at home.

I really really don't understand what is hard to understand.

Also, they provide end-to-end attestation on the entire software stack up to each workload. They can tell you exactly what firmware is running on each chip on their stack, etc. The hypervisor they use is pretty cool, too.

> I really really don't understand what is hard to understand.

I mean, not every single person on HN is a 10x developer that knows 300 programming languages known to man and 45 more known only to catgirls.

I'm a daytime Windows admin, this isn't stuff I normally work with, especially because it's targeted at a specific stack of things that I don't touch.

I really really don't understand what is hard to understand.

Cloud is a nebulous term (intended), it can mean many things (SaaS? IaaS? PaaS?) and of course your own cloud is a self-contradictory term to boot so leaves you wondering what parts will be different and how. It might not be complicated but it's not easy to communicate if you start with that word.

It seems like they're vertically integrating everything from hardware to the hypervisor/orchestration layer (something that serves the same function as Kubernetes?) along with their own developer tooling for deploying and managing workloads.

edit: And it seems like it's aimed at companies that don't want to pay cloud margins, but don't (yet) have the expertise to set up a production-worthy Kubernetes (or similar) cluster from scratch. An opinionated appliance vs DIY approach.

The idea of a company buying an out of the box k8s because they’re not able to set it up themselves sounds insane to me. What’s the plan when it breaks? Send the server back?

I imagine the expectation is that the company obviously needs to know how to perform regular hardware maintenance, but the hypervisor/orchestration layer should be so well integrated that it doesn't require an expert team to operate (like you would need with a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, which is notoriously difficult to understand and operate in production).

If that illusion breaks and you need to get into the weeds in the same way you do with self-hosted k8s, then the value proposition of their product goes poof. I'm just speculating, of course.

> self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, which is notoriously difficult to understand and operate in production).

Yeah that was my reference point - cluster at home. Breaks often & hard and usually end up wiping it. Good for home use but I’d not want to rely on it for prod

What distribution are you using? I’ve been running k3os (with etcd) for about two years without issues, other than Rancher Labs dropping support for it so it’s well past EoL.

Vanilla K3s on a mixture of node types. Mostly ARM

It is a practice cluster though so I’m not exactly careful in my experimenting

You can check out Simplivity from HP that does something similar, but in a more traditional enterprise setup. We use them as local VMware and storage for factories and warehouses where there is need for compute and storage that needs to be close physically and we don’t want to bother with hardware maintenance.

> out of the box k8s

Just to be clear, though this did seem to get cleared up below, the level of abstraction you're working with on an Oxide rack is VMs, not k8s. If you wanted to run your own k8s on top, you could.

> because they’re not able to set it up themselves sounds insane to me

It is not about ability. It's about quality, and what you want to spend time on vs what you want to spend money on. (and of course time is money...)

There's a lot that goes into building and maintaining a private cloud. Some would prefer to build it themselves, some would prefer to focus on their core business and buy something that works well out of the box.

> What’s the plan when it breaks? Send the server back?

Building a robust product is very important to us, but so is supporting it. If something breaks, you contact support, and it gets sorted.

An advantage here is because we have created almost everything ourselves, under the same roof, we have fantastic insight into how the system works. No pointing the blame at some other vendor's firmware!

    > buying an out of the box k8s because they’re not able to set it up themselves

As I understand, this is exactly the purpose of Red Hat's OpenShift. It is a layer over k8s with a friendly GUI. I use it at work, and I don't have a clue about k8s.

Why would you think they are limiting themselves to Kubernetes?

I don't, I was just using it as a point of comparison against Oxide's own software stack.

It seems this is mainframe (a complete, supported, vertically integrated solution), just not from IBM.

It's like Openstack-in-a-box except with a promise that it'll behave more like AWS than Openstack. And you buy hardware.

Companies that run large on-prem workloads and want to have similar hardware/software to what the likes of Google, FB etc. have in their data centers

Does that mean that Oxide sells computers that are optimized for on-premise cloud deployments?

I think they sell something like mini and on prem gcp / aws. You just connect the thing to power and ethernet and now you got your own locally running Webinterface / API which can start VMs, networks etc

Oh neat, I can have my own DigitalOcean with one of these?!

Not quite. They don't offer out of the box managed services like DigitalOcean. No one-click MongoDB or stuff like that. No out of the box Kubernetes.

You basically get Networking, Compute and Storage. Everything else you have to build on top.

You will also get stuff like Terraform provider, SDKs and so on.

> I can

I guess if you are millionaire you could.

Ah okay, so you get the foundation. Still, pretty cool.

This is correct, yes.

That’s exactly what this is advertising, yes.

Thanks. But as someone who isn't familiar with Oxide, this was not clear to me at all. The "Just Cloud" threw me off and I was reminded of shuttle.rs which also advertises easy deployment of (Rust) services. I could not see that this was supposed to be about on-premise hardware.

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