[farawayea]

Their tech may be more than adequate today. Bigger businesses may not buy from a small startup company. They expect a lot more. Illumos is a less popular OS. It wouldn't be the first choice for the OS I'd rely on. Who writes the security mitigations for speculative execution bugs? Who patches CVEs in the shipped software which doesn't use Rust?

[AlotOfReading]

The answer to "who does X" is Oxide. That's the point. You're not going to Dell who's integrating multiple vendors in the same box in a way that "should" work. You're getting a rack where everything is designed to work together from top to bottom.

The goal is that you can email Oxide and they'll be able fix it regardless of where it is in the stack, even down to the processor ROM.

[toomuchtodo]

This. If you want on prem cloud infra without having to roll it yourself, Oxide is the solution.

(no affiliation, just a fan)

[lillecarl]

If you want on prem infra in exactly the shape and form Oxide delivers*

I've read and understood from Joyent and SmartOS that they believe fault tolerant block devices / filesystems is the wrong abstraction, your software should handle losing storage.

[eaasen]

We do not put the onus on customers to tolerate data loss. Our storage is redundant and spread through the rack so that if you lose drives or even an entire computer, your data is still safe. https://oxide.computer/product/storage

[panick21_]

They have partly changed their position on that. You can listen to their podcast on their distributed block storage solution.

[yencabulator]

And a big enough customer will evaluate Oxide's resources and consider for themselves whether they think Oxide can provide a quick enough turnaround for everything. That's what GP is talking about.

[throw0101d]

> Bigger businesses may not buy from a small startup company.

What would you classify Shopify as?

> One existing Oxide user is e-commerce giant Shopify, which indicates the growth potential for the systems available.

* https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/07/04/oxide-ships-first-clou...

Their CEO has tweeted about it:

* https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1793798092212367669

> Who writes the security mitigations for speculative execution bugs? Who patches CVEs in the shipped software which doesn't use Rust?

Oxide.

This is all a pre-canned solution: just use the API like you would an off-prem cloud. Do you worry about AWS patching stuff? And how many people purchasing 'traditional' servers from Dell/HPe/Lenovo worry about patching links like the LOM?

Further, all of Oxide's stuff is on Github, so you're in better shape for old stuff, whereas if the traditional server vendors EO(S)L something firmware-wise you have no recourse.

[cdchn]

How much did Shopify buy? Sounds like from what the CEO is saying they bought 1 unit.

>We learned that Oxide has so far shipped “under 20 racks,” which illustrates the selective markets its powerful systems are aimed at.

>B&F understands most of those systems were deployed as single units at customer sites. Therefore, Oxide hopes these and new customers will scale up their operations in response to positive outcomes.

Yikes. If they sold 20 racks in July, how many are they up to now?

[packetlost]

Illumos is the OS for the hypervisor and core services, they don't expect their customers to run their code directly on that OS, but inside VMs.

[steveklabnik]

> Bigger businesses may not buy from a small startup company.

Our early customers include government, finance, and places like Shopify.

You’re not wrong that some places may prefer older companies but that doesn’t mean they all do.

Illumos is not really directly relevant to the customer, it’s a non user facing implementation detail.

We provide security updates.

[mycoliza]

We write the security mitigations. We patch the CVEs. Oxide employs many, perhaps most, of the currently active illumos maintainers --- although I don't work on the illumos kernel personally, I talk to those folks every day.

A big part of what we're offering our customers is the promise that there's one vendor who's responsible for everything in the rack. We want to be the responsible party for all the software we ship, whether it's firmware, the host operating system, the hypervisor, and everything else. Arguably, the promise that there's one vendor you can yell at for everything is a more important differentiator for us than any particular technical aspect of our hardware or software.

[sunshowers]

The illumos bare-metal OS is not directly visible to customers.