Oxide: Control plane data storage requirements | Hacker News Reader

Oxide: Control plane data storage requirements

rfd.shared.oxide.computer

59 pointstosh21 comments

Ultimately, they selected CockroachDB, as described in "RFD 110: CockroachDB for the control plane database" [1]. Now, published just yesterday, "RDD 508: Whither CockroachDB?" [2] discusses what to do in light of Cockroach going proprietary.

[1]: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0110 [2]: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0508

I'm getting increasingly nervous about baking in assumptions on software that doesn't have a strong guarantee of staying open source. Foundations like the CNCF help here, where projects are assigned ownership to the foundation.

There is a middle ground though. It's not practical to only build on top of foundation-owned software. So a metric I use these days is to consider the cost of replacement or fork maintenance, combined with how likely I think a license change would be, as part of evaluation.

Even with the CNCF badge there is no guarantee. See the sketchy ownership semi scandal over Linkerd

Even with the Apache foundation therenis no guarantee they’ll be maintainers for support and active development. Only guarantee is a company that is profitable but doesn’t want more money…

Maybe people should be getting nervous that the whole flower power mentality of FOSS doesn't really scale when there are bills to pay, and families to nurture.

> Based on past experience, the reputation of a system or stories about it being used by other organizations are weak data points. We will want to independently verify any properties we care about.

That's an hidden pearl of wisdom right there.

RFD = Request for Decision

This CockroachDB issue is an example of their public decision making process.

RFDs described in detail here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001

I was curious to know what type of tool this is built on. Sounds like it's a static site generator that can process AsciiDoc, but I don't have any more detail than that. The links to GitHub repos in section 5 were all broken - maybe it's private?

The RFD site is open source: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site. Only some RFDs are public though (I used to work at Oxide)

This is the RFD site: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site. The actual contents are in a Git repo.

Where can I read about what exactly Oxide is? The main page states "No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud" and not much besides that.

Oxide makes a rack-scale computer called the Oxide Computer, here's the intro page: https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction

It's unfortunate that page briefly flashes some text and goes blank leaving an error in the browser console

   Uncaught ReferenceError: TextEncoderStream is not defined
    <anonymous> https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction:18

   Error: Minified React error #423; visit https://reactjs.org/docs/error-decoder.html?invariant=423
   for the full message or use the non-minified dev environment for full errors and additional helpful warnings.
    zh https://docs.oxide.computer/assets/components-BfA3Cgf2.js:40

That's something on your side - I'm running a pretty strict tracker/ad blocker that inadvertently affects a lot of sites, and it works for me.

I’d recommend updating your browser. TextEncoderStream has been in Firefox since 2022, in Chrome since 2018, and in Safari since 2021

Thanks for the bug report. We could stand to have a better catch-all error page for this case.

Looks like this browser API is used by Remix’s new Single Fetch feature, which coincidentally we just started using last week. Sorry we broke the site for you. We don’t have as clear of a browser support policy as we probably should, but if we did, I doubt we would be guaranteeing support for two year old browsers unless we had a customer request for it.

https://github.com/remix-run/remix/blame/cc65962b1a96d1e1343...

It's a computer podcast run by Rust programmers. They also LARP as a computer company.

>They also LARP as a computer company.

Oxide has a one of a kind product that they're delivered to dozens of customers. They are not "LARP[ing]" by any means.

I think you missed the silent "j/k".

I think they're trolling, likely personal.

This video might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ZziEA3zPg

There are a few follow up videos as well.

Basically, they sell big racks of servers.

this is so cool, these guys are literally from the year 3000 lol

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