Congrats, Bryan and team! I've been following your evolution for a while now. People might just look at it and say "It's just a rack of CPUs and storage." And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them (or at least flame them in online posts).
Over the decades the separation between "software" people and "hardware" people has grown. With "cloud" people have grown comfortable papering over poor basic performance by abstracting away even your visibility into how a system is running. "You don't need to worry about that! It's ~serverless~." But you'll worry when that bill comes due at the end of the month.
With systems like Oxide, you are allowing users to once again actually see what they get, and ensure they get what they paid for, from a high-end cloud server.
It should be putting other systems providers on-notice that the days of flaky, non-performant, and poorly-integrated components are behind us. People want beasts from their servers.
And software designers, this is also your wake-up call that you can't just put lousy-performing software with poor CPU utilization and memory hogging on big metal and hope that it's "good enough." You really need to design your software to run ~efficiently~ in such systems.
> People might just look at it and say "It's just a rack of CPUs and storage." And I can only imagine just how much you might be tempted to throttle them
I'm not even the target market for this and I completely understand the feeling there. There's a lot of people who just have no conception of computing hardware anymore. People who are tied to AWS and have spent their entire careers working with AWS and now simply believe with a passion that "that's just how it is" as AWS continues to raise prices while their own cost of compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. This is a race to the bottom.
This is a hot take, but I think Moore's law/Wright's Law has actually been disastrous for the entire field of software engineering even while it's been an amazing boon to software businesses.
Yep. The real world is still far from being fully hosted in the cloud. I've been in a few places which would massively benefit from Oxide's approach. Also I'm a fan of the team from the joyent days so probably I'm biaised. But I've seen a few poor implementations of the "private cloud" and oh boy, I wish well from the people who will maintain that in the long run...
Over the decades the separation between "software" people and "hardware" people has grown. With "cloud" people have grown comfortable papering over poor basic performance by abstracting away even your visibility into how a system is running. "You don't need to worry about that! It's ~serverless~." But you'll worry when that bill comes due at the end of the month.
With systems like Oxide, you are allowing users to once again actually see what they get, and ensure they get what they paid for, from a high-end cloud server.
It should be putting other systems providers on-notice that the days of flaky, non-performant, and poorly-integrated components are behind us. People want beasts from their servers.
And software designers, this is also your wake-up call that you can't just put lousy-performing software with poor CPU utilization and memory hogging on big metal and hope that it's "good enough." You really need to design your software to run ~efficiently~ in such systems.