Also, it has little to do with the cloud; it is yet another hyperconverged infra.
Weirdly, it is attached to something very few people want: Solaris. This relates to the people behind it who still can't figure out why Linux won and Solaris didn't.
Yes they are using illumos/Solaris to host this but they don't sell on that, they sell on the functionality of this layer — allowing people to deploy to owned infra in a way that is similar to how they'd deploy to AWS or Azure. How much do you ever think about the system hosting your VM on those clouds? You think about your VMs, the API or web interface to deploy and configure, but not the host OS. With Oxide racks the customers are not maintaining the illumos substrate (as long as Oxide is around).
You could be right about demand, there is risk in a venture like this. But presumably the team thought about this - I think folks who worked at Sun, Oracle, Joyent, and Samsung and made SmartOS probably developed a decent sense of market demand, enough to make a convincing case to their funders.
"Sir, if you have nothing to hide, why do you talk so fast, and pronounce words like a foreigner who learned English from a book?"
:)
We love you Bryan, never change.
Now you need to know both the OS they chose and the OS you chose...
(No, I don't believe it'll be 100% hands-off for the host. This is an early stage product, with a lot of custom parts, their own distributed block storage, hypervisor, and so on.)
I wouldn't have picked Opensolaris, but it's a lot better than other vendors that are either fully closed source, or thin proprietary wrappers over Linux with spotty coverage and you're not allowed to touch the underlying OS for risk of disrupting the managed product.
I don't run on-prem clusters or clouds but know a couple people who do and, at large enough scale, it is a constant "fuck-shit-stack on top of itself" (to quote Reggie Watts). There is almost always something wrong and some people upset about it.
The promise of a fully integrated system (compute HW, network HW, all firmware/drivers written by experts using Rust wherever possible) that pays attention to optimizing all your OpEx metrics is a big deal.
It may take Oxide a couple more years to really break into the market in a big way, but if they can stick it out, they will do very well.
Solaris is still Solaris, as of the latest release last month. OpenSolaris hasn't been OpenSolaris in a while and is Illumos, yes.
That's because they own the whole stack, from CPU to GUI and support it as a unit. That's the benefit of having a product where a single owner builds and supports it as a whole.
My impression of Oxide is that that's the level of single source of truth they are bringing to enterprise in-house cloud. So, I strongly doubt the innards would ever become customer-facing (unless the customer specifically wants that, being open source after all).
Their choice in foundation OS (for lack of a better term) really should not matter to any customer.
Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there are many situations where the financials and or enabled options of owning something make a lot of sense. Right now, the kind of experience you get with AWS and co. can only be rented, not bought. Some people want to buy houses instead of renting them.
And Canonical played with a cluster-in-a-box all the way back in 2013-2014: https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-unde...
You could turn it into an OpenStack cloud in ~20 mins with an automated Juju OpenStack install.
Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix?
If you haven't lived through this, the answer is: nobody. Everyone points fingers at the other 4 and ignore your calls.
Back in the day you could buy a fully integrated system (from CPU to hardware to OS) from Sun or SGI or HP and you had a single company to answer all the calls, so it was much better. Today you can't really get this level of integration and support anymore.
(Actually, you probably can from IBM, which is why they're still around. But I have no experience in the IBM universe.)
This is why Oxide is so exciting to me. I hope I can be in a company that becomes a customer at some point.
Their competition has open source firmware as well:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-syste...
[0] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
At least with Oxide there is a glimmer of hope for a better future in this regard.
Could be! Seems too early to tell though, and remains to be seen whether it pencils. Which is the whole idea of starting a new venture, no?
