[dns_snek]

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.

[Havoc]

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?

[steveklabnik]

> 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!

[calgoo]

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.

[dns_snek]

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.

[Havoc]

> 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

[sgarland]

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.

[Havoc]

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

[throwaway2037]

    > 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.

[rcarmo]

Why would you think they are limiting themselves to Kubernetes?

[dns_snek]

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