from Hacker News

Oxide Cloud Computer. No Cables. No Assembly. Just Cloud

by vmoore on 3/24/24, 12:20 AM with 111 comments

• by zja on 3/24/24, 2:07 AM

  It’ll probably be a while before i get a chance to work on one of these machines, but I had a chance to meet a couple employees, Steve Klabnik and Travis Haymore, at a “Beers and Boards” meetup Oxide put on after a conference in Raleigh last year. They were really cool, as were a lot of the local folks that showed up. Would highly recommend going if they ever do one in your city!

• by transpute on 3/24/24, 5:19 AM

  Wishcasting a future Framework [1] laptop, bundled with Oxide rack for local and remote management:

    AMD Pro CPU with SKINIT and SEV
    AMD OpenSIL + OSS coreboot firmware
    Motherboard with Infineon 9672 (or newer) TPM for DRTM secure launch
    ECC memory
    Add-on modules for OcuLink [2] (external PCIe) and Nitrokey (2FA, HSM) with OSS Rust firmware [3]
    OS support for QubesOS (with Oxide management VM) or Oxide custom OS
  

  This could be used in the following business contexts:

    High-integrity client workstation within Oxide manufacturing supply chain(s)
    Customer local admin of Oxide rack
    Customer remote admin of Oxide rack, with mutual attestation
    Oxide remote troubleshooting of customer Oxide rack, with mutual attestation
  

  Plus demand-generating use cases from buyers of the equivalent Framework laptop model, who can install their preferred OSS components, including but not limited to the above business contexts.

  [1] Framework, https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1632642. Lenovo and other OEMs may follow Framework's lead.

  [2] OcuLink expansion module, https://community.frame.work/t/oculink-expansion-bay-module/...

  [3] Nitrokey Rust firmware, https://github.com/Nitrokey/nitrokey-3-firmware

• by vaylian on 3/24/24, 7:35 AM

  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?

• by ChrisArchitect on 3/24/24, 2:44 AM

  Bunch of discussion four months ago regarding their official blog post:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891

• by mad_vill on 3/24/24, 3:32 AM

  Curious if oxide is considering a 1-2U product.

  Feel like there is a larger potential customer base there but it also seems like they would lose the edge they built by owning the full rack. (I.e. integrating with customer TORs and network fabric is a nightmare.)

• by panick21_ on 3/24/24, 2:26 AM

  I recently watch:

  Unplugging the Debugger - Live and postmortem debugging in a remote system - Matt Keeter [1]

  The talk was at the Open Source Firmware Conference.

  Pretty cool look into how their system works under the hood.

  [1] https://vimeo.com/877092565

• by ilhuadjkv on 3/24/24, 2:01 AM

  Would love to know what the minimum buy in is on one of these

• by kjellsbells on 3/24/24, 3:46 PM

  Not making a value comparison here, but reminds me strongly of the "engineered systems" of the early 2000s (where you buy a box+database all in one go from HP)...and most recently of the new Nexus stuff coming out of Microsoft's acquisition of the ATT cloud people.

  See https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/operator-nexus/azure-opera...

  AIUI Microsoft will ask you to buy several racks worth of (oem?) server gear and switch fabric, configure it to load up their version of kubernetes, and then leave you to run whatever workloads you like (or they approve of? Not sure) with the hook being that you can manage it all from azure.

  Pointed strongly at telcos, and I imagine that you cant get this without spending at least a quarter mil on hardware. Plus whatever azure fees there are? I wonder how many msft expect to sell, especially as telcos with spare cash are like unicorns.

• by PebblesHD on 3/24/24, 3:21 AM

  Are there any videos or screencasts of one of these in operation? I’d love to see a fresh out of box to up and running walkthrough similar to what VMWare produced for Tanzu. It’s such a niece thing that lots of tech people who’d be really interested will never get to play with one but it seems there’s not much material out there.

• by tehnub on 3/24/24, 2:12 AM

  Is this a rebrand? I don’t remember it being called a “cloud computer”. (Or why else is this on HN?)

• by rkagerer on 3/26/24, 11:19 PM

  I get the hardware side.

  I don't get the platform side.

  What guest OS's does it support? Can you create "bare-metal" applications that run in some kind of container on it? Does this resemble a re-invented ESXi?

  How does the performance and redundancy of their storage layer compare to something like GRAID?

• by nemanja on 3/24/24, 5:29 PM

  Timing could’t be better. VMWare is actively firing and pissing off large swats of their customer base and basically Nutanix is the only serious alternative for onprem.

  What is the total overhead (in terms of cores, memory) of the management layer with Oxide (incl. block storage, vmm, etc.)?

• by nightowl_games on 3/24/24, 4:41 PM

  I didn't think oxide was gonna make sense when they first announced it. What was gonna be their competitive advantage? I thought.

  I'm seriously impressed at how much they improved the on prem experience

• by lopkeny12ko on 3/24/24, 2:17 AM

  > Get In Touch

  > Contact Sales

  Nope, hard pass. If you don't list your prices on your website I'm never going to be a customer.

• by the_common_man on 3/24/24, 2:42 AM

  Is this like a nutanix? What is this?

• by andrewstuart on 3/24/24, 2:52 AM

  I’m curious to know if this is a good business model.

  Is the a market for these?