
Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence - steveklabnik
https://oxide.computer/blog/introducing-the-oxide-computer-company/
======
dang
There were three large threads. We merged them. The other URLs:

[https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-
garage/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/)

[http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-
com...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-
company/)

Comments about the garage were probably in response to the jessfraz.com post.
Other than that I didn't see any merged comments that were specific to one
URL.

------
signal11
This is just my first impressions so it may be wrong.

Looking at their blog - their proposition appears to me to be, AWS, Google and
Azure can build and manage their systems better than Random Corp. trying to
build and manage their own servers by ordering from Dell.

Oxide Computer will try and bridge that gap and let anyone buy efficient,
manageable servers.

This is of some interest to me as there are lots of use cases for which cloud
isn't practical or has regulatory challenges, and this should give
organizations for whom this is an issue some good options. If nothing else,
it'll be interesting as a target for Google's Anthos or Azure's On-Premises
service.

Edit: This is a good summary[1], I think:

> Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call
> “infrastructure privilege” since they long ago decided they could build
> their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity
> vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to
> everyone else!

[1] [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-
garage/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/)

~~~
tw04
Call me skeptical. Part of what allowed Google/Amazon/Facebook to "build their
own servers" is that they're ordering 10,000+ at a time from an ODM like
Foxconn who doesn't want to deal with people that want 100 at a time.

But with that comes rigid standardization... which typically hasn't worked
well in the enterprise. Everybody wants to be cloud-like until they figure out
being cloud-like means you lose all of your hardware-level flexibility. Oh you
wanted one with 512GB of memory instead of 768? Too bad.

~~~
hinkley
I'm guardedly optimistic. Some people are being nervous about how vague
they're being but I'm gonna wait an see if they're just playing very close to
the vest. The problem with talking excitedly about the things that are safe to
talk about is that it makes it very obviously awkward what _isn 't_ being
talked about. I'm sure a lot of us got a refresher in how that feels last
week.

Backblaze has their own custom server racks and we seem to like them just
fine.

~~~
exikyut
(What happened last week? Saw a few articles, honestly unsure which applies
here)

~~~
hinkley
Oh, Thanksgiving. The most important time of year for Americans not to bring
up politics or old hurts.

------
AndrewBissell
A few months back I randomly ran across Cantrill, Frazelle, and Tuck while
they were at a FedEx Center printing and signing some docs for Oxide. As a
recent convert to Cantrill YouTube fandom, I recognized him and said hello.
They were all tremendously welcoming and friendly, and Cantrill took a great
deal of time to shoot the breeze with me about Rust, the plans for their new
business, and the pain points of working with Xoogler architects ( _not_ in
reference to Frazelle, I should note).

I've been watching off and on for their launch announcement ever since. Some
of the reservations about their business plan expressed in this thread ring
true with me, and yet I hope they will succeed in spite of it all. The last
thing the world needs is an internet which runs entirely on computers owned by
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

------
cfors
Here is a relevant quote from Jess' blog:

> Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call
> “infrastructure privilege” since they long ago decided they could build
> their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity
> vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to
> everyone else. [0]

Is this same infrastructure privilege an effective, internal cloud? From my
experience with large internal cloud platforms, the problems are almost always
organizational ones.

Regardless, I am definitely hoping that Oxide can provide a better experience.
Maybe with centralizing all hardware into a single group, rather than have
network folks do switches, another team do servers, and a totally separate
group to do ACL's, etc. you could improve the experience of managing an entire
datacenter.

Edit: Forgot the link: [0] [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-
garage/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/)

~~~
jboynyc
Source: [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-
garage/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/)

In the same post, the author writes: "If you want to read more about some of
the deep technical problems we will be solving check out my ACM Queue
articles" followed by some links. The first, on open-source firmware, even
appears to be freely available:
[https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3349301](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3349301)

So that may help get the necessary context for this company launch.

~~~
cfors
Ah sorry, forgot to link the post! Thank you.

------
doublerebel
When investors bet on an early stage startup, they are betting on the team.
This is startup fundraising 101, the track record of the team is what shows
they will stick it out and find a solution.

These are three people who know product! But they could be totally wrong about
how the market will take the product, and have to be willing to work together
and possibly pivot until they find product-market fit.

Finding teams like this pre-product is what makes early stage investment so
valuable. There should be no confusion about the focus on team and vision.

I am stoked to see cloud scale tooling become even closer to the hardware, and
become more accessible. The completeness and openness of the stack is what
attracted me to -- and kept me on -- Joyent's products. Best wishes on your
new venture!!

------
preston4tw
I follow Jessie and Bryan both on Twitter and at least with what Jessie has
been exploring since she left her last job, this seems like a natural
progression.

It trips me out to see other people in the comments that don't know who Jessie
and Bryan are. They're legends to me, and I consider myself basically a SRE. I
highly recommend following them on Twitter as well as virtually any talk
they've given. Just go type their names into YouTube. Steve Tuck doesn't ring
a bell for me, but considering the company he's in I want to learn more about
Steve.

I'm super interested to see what comes out of this. I think Jessie has a
passion for security (also many other things, but it's what comes to mind),
and Bryan for debugging (similarly, many other things as well). I think those
are really good backgrounds to have when approaching hardware these days,
considering the recent security vulnerabilities around speculative attacks on
hardware (specter etc.).

Some of the conversations Jessie started on twitter in the past few months
raised some interesting questions around open hardware and open firmware, and
the problems with proprietary and closed source hardware and firmware.

It sounds like this Oxide project might be in a similar space as
[https://www.opencompute.org/](https://www.opencompute.org/). I'll be
interested to see if they partner at all. I'm also very interested to see what
the actual products are, how open any hardware or firmware ends up being, and
if this venture is successful, if they end up at the same place as any other
major hardware company or if they tread new ground.

~~~
driverdan
> It trips me out to see other people in the comments that don't know who
> Jessie and Bryan are.

I always find this funny. Why would everyone know who they are? There are
thousands of interesting people in tech. It's impossible to know of everyone.

~~~
egdod
Jessie’s blog gets posted here with some regularity.

~~~
duxup
I don't know about everyone else but I personally read a lot of HN and I
probabbly remember a handful of people's names whose articles I have read.

------
SEJeff
Given the players here (Brian and Steve are both from Joyent) and what little
I can deduce from the marketing fluff on their website, this seems like
they're just trying to build a hardware stack to go with something like
Joyent's (most awesome) Triton:

[https://github.com/joyent/triton](https://github.com/joyent/triton)

Triton is/was the betamax of on-prem cloud orchestration. It is better tech in
the beginning than Kubernetes, but then lost due to the stigma associated with
Joyent/Solaris. Kind of a shame as it is really good tech.

A bit more non-technical overview:
[https://www.joyent.com/triton/compute](https://www.joyent.com/triton/compute)

~~~
travbrack
It's pretty good but if you want to do Docker, Kubernetes, etc, you're stuck
using LX branded zones which (my layperson understanding) is a Linux user
space on top of a SmartOS kernel with Linux system calls implemented. It works
OK for most things, but compatibility is a real issue.

------
milankragujevic
All 3 titles should [probably, IMO] be corrected to name "Server Company". A
"computer" is a superset of servers, desktops, laptops, embedded devices and
mobile devices. That way it is more accurate. Currently it is ambiguous what
the "computer company" is actually going to "do"/produce/sell.

~~~
quaquaqua1
This is like arguing whether Amazon is a tech company or a retail services
company. The S&P say it's a retail services company, but we all agree it is
powered almost thoroughly by technology in general.

~~~
rchaud
When Amazon formed, Bezos described it as a website you could buy books from.
I'm sure the authors could have picked a plain-English description as well.

------
tzs
Random observations on the garage photo.

Nice collection of floppies (3.5" and 5.25"). I wonder how long floppies
stored in a garage actually remain usable?

The cans that say "RePop" and BSW on them are microphone pop filters from
Broadcast Supply World. For podcasting?

On the shelf below the floppy shelf looks like some kind of tape drive, and
maybe those are tape cartridges to the left of it?

Is that a couple of motherboards in anti-static bags on top of the tape drive?

What is the box to the right of that? It kind of looks like an adjustable DC
power supply, common in electronics labs, except I don't see any terminals on
front...unless those two round things on the lower right are jacks? But the
jacks are usually black and red, and I can't see any color there in the photo.

Based on the box colors, the top box of Coke is twisted mango diet Coke, which
was introduced in early 2018, putting an upper limit on the age of the photo.

There is some kind of tablet with pen on the desk. Anyone recognize what kind
it is?

That's a lot of pens. They should have bought 3 or 4 fewer pens (which would
hardly even be noticed) and used the money for a taller jar.

Interesting file cabinet. What applications is that style of file cabinet
designed for? I don't think I've seen one with so many horizontal draws that
are that short before.

I can't recognize anything on the keychain sitting on the desk
(well...anything other than keys I mean).

~~~
hokumguru
Tablet:
[https://remarkable.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAiZPvBRDZARIsAORkq7dzKg...](https://remarkable.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAiZPvBRDZARIsAORkq7dzKgo0KOYlBnuq50BZqvUOpfRNplrLGBxrbAesEju8v2jNwuqe-
XUaAvnBEALw_wcB)

------
laputan_machine
Interesting idea, and I wish them the best of luck. However this line:

> _Further, as cloud-borne SaaS companies mature from being strictly growth
> focused to being more margin focused, it seems likely that more will
> consider buying machines instead of always renting them_

Is not something I think to be true from my experience of being in a large
company that has moved away from on-prem hosting to cloud providers. Cloud is
cheaper. A lot cheaper, especially if using managed services (with the proper
arch! With the exception of logging which is surprisingly expensive). The
hardware costs of rolling your own hosting is not the expensive part.

~~~
jonny_eh
Netflix famously moved their infrastructure from their own data centres to
AWS.

~~~
twoodfin
Though isn’t that the “commodity” part of their infrastructure? They’re
presumably still spending like gangbusters on their “on premises” ISP-local
hardware & software.

I imagine that’s the extreme end of the market Oxide is targeting: Provide a
HW/SW platform to build your differentiation on, because the capabilities and
value (& moat) aren’t there in the commodity cloud.

~~~
hinkley
I really think this shouldn't be an either-or thing, most especially for
established companies, but to some extent for growing ones as well.

If you run a data center in the same city/cities as your engineering strengths
are located, that doesn't necessarily give you the geographical diversity you
need for many companies. But if you don't run any data centers, you're blind
to some of the cost structures, and architectural limitations of the system,
and you can become soft.

I was going to make a simile to Google and Facebook having their own hardware
divisions, but I don't really need to, because they are planning to make
cloud-friendly custom hardware for data centers. This seems like an area that
the incumbents should be all over but I can't recall the last time I read of
innovations from them. Which means there is space for someone new to establish
a toe-hold.

If I were based in Chicago I'd want a data center in Chicago, and Cloud
Servers on the West Coast, (and Europe, etc as applicable). But the lock-in
situation is untenable to me right now. It's pretty easy to end up deploying
multiple solutions for the same situation. That just complicates reasoning
about the system. It bears a resemblance to the Lavaflow antipattern and I can
tell you that either can be no fun at all.

~~~
hinkley
I'm not sure why I chose the phrase 'planning to' about custom hardware, when
we know that they've been doing this for a very long time, and FB in
particular has not only published designs but multiple cycles of amendments to
those designs.

------
LeonM
Hey Jessie, congrats on getting your company up and running!

> setting up infrastructure themselves is in a great deal of pain and they
> have been largely neglected by any existing vendor

Can you elaborate on what these pains are, and how OEMs aren't helping their
customers with this?

I guess what I'm trying to ask is: what will Oxide do different compared to
existing OEMs?

~~~
nodesocket
> largely neglected by any existing vendor

I am not sure about this. It seems all their experience is geared towards
software with little to nobody from a traditional hardware engineering
background. Wouldn't they be better off using open compute[1] designs and
focusing on the software inside? Building hardware just seems like a stretch
trying to compete against Dell, HP, and Supermicro all of which have
"Kubernetes" / high density offerings.

[1] [https://www.opencompute.org/](https://www.opencompute.org/)

~~~
wmf
_Wouldn 't they be better off using open compute designs and focusing on the
software inside?_

How do you know that's not what they're doing? If they sell servers it doesn't
mean they designed them. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some hardware
changes for secure boot or something though.

------
xwowsersx
Can someone explain in simple terms what this company will be building? I
cannot tell from this post or the other on Oxide.

~~~
umvi
> Can someone explain in simple terms what this company will be building?

Computers. Literal, physical computers you can buy and stick in a server rack.

Specifically, computers with the hardware/software optimized and tuned for
"hyperscaler" uses (think Kubernetes).

~~~
lukego
This sounds superficially like a company called Nebula from the OpenStack
days. [https://slashdot.org/story/13/04/03/034217/nebula-debuts-
clo...](https://slashdot.org/story/13/04/03/034217/nebula-debuts-cloud-
computer-based-on-openstack)

------
VectorLock
Great Hacker News blasting but whats the product?

~~~
anon1m0us
My initial impression is a return to on-premise data centers but with cheaper,
commodity hardware and a software stack on top.

They are doing for on-prem with hotswappable computers in a cloud what hot
swappable hard drives did for on-prem storage.

My prediction is that their technology will be used by existing data centers
more than it will be used by enterprises wanting to return to on-prem from
their current cloud operations. They might help serve internal customers in
the enterprise, like developers, and intranets, but the cost of pipes will be
prohibitive for companies needing lots of bandwidth to serve external
customers.

~~~
devdas
It's a lot cheaper to get fat pipes than to pay for data transfer in the cloud
at scale.

~~~
anon1m0us
To function at youtube scale, you need access to multiple backbones. Yes, I
agree, Sprint will run an OC3, or fiber, what have you, to your office
anywhere in America for $15,000 a month, but that will still be several hops
from UUNET.

That Sprint line is like a farm to market road to your warehouse, which works
fine when you are serving customers from an ecommerce site or sending and
receiving emails or even opening files from NYC and your onprem cloud is in
NYC.

It breaks down when you need higher throughput to serve millions of customers.
At that point, you need to be at the crossroads of a couple interstate
highways which would be analogous to a carrier hotel like at 1 Wilshire in Los
Angeles.

I expect oxide.computer will open up on demand scalability to existing service
providers who already rent the physical space in locations like 1 Wilshire.
Most of those providers today buy hardware from HP or Dell, which is expensive
and then also have to manage the software layer on top.

From what I can tell, based on the very little actual _product_ marketing I
have found, is that oxide will provide a turnkey solution from one shop.
Unfortunately, at the moment, it's hard to figure out what the company
actually does, because it's about the team right now.

~~~
devdas
If you are a cloud _customer_ , you probably don't need to function at Youtube
scale.

When you need to serve millions of customers, you get space in a datacenter
with multiple telecom providers and start peering at various exchanges. You
certainly don't pay per byte of data transferred, and you don't start to build
your own physical plant.

------
mychael
When the blue checkmark crowd on Twitter thinks everyone knows who they are.

------
Timothycquinn
This is great news for the Rust community as Bryan has been a strong proponent
of using Rust at lower levels of computer systems such as drivers and it
sounds like Oxide will be focusing much of their development on this level of
development in order to deliver best in class enterprise grade servers.

This is a fantastic development for the Rust community that will likely have a
positive impact on the linux ecosystem, in the long run if they do this driver
development in an open manner.

I look forward to following their developments.

------
AzzieElbab
I can't figure where all the negativity is coming from. Envy, sloth, pride?
Good luck Oxide founders !!!

~~~
wmf
HN doesn't know anything about hardware + Oxide hasn't explained themselves in
detail + cool cynicism. HN also thought that Dropbox was basically rsync.

------
kick
This post title is a reference to _The Soul of a New Machine_ , which both
Cantrill and Frazelle have written posts on:

[https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-
wi...](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-with-soul/)

[http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-
sou...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-soul-of-a-
new-machine/)

~~~
acomjean
For those that don't know "Soul of a New Machine" is a book by Tracey Kidder.
Its about the team at Data General building a new computer. I was skeptical
about this book, but its really quite a good read. (My mom worked at Data
General, which is how I ended up with the book)

The book won a Pulitzer prize for non-fiction.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

~~~
sowbug
If you like this book, then you'll also like _Reminiscences of a Stock
Operator_ , which is a fictionalized account of an occasionally successful
stock trader named Jesse Lauriston Livermore who was born in 1877. It doesn't
sound captivating, but it is.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Opera...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Operator)

------
excerionsforte
Nice to see Bryan Cantrill going all in on his assertion that containers must
run on hardware.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXWaECk9XqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXWaECk9XqM)

------
at-fates-hands
I love the marketing mumbo jumbo:

 _True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around
density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to
everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure._

How are they going to do this? Buy equipment from other vendors and resell
them? Build their own servers from scratch? Nothing in the above paragraph
tells me how they plan to be better than any other company right now and why,
as a business owner I would want to buy my servers from them.

------
peterwwillis
Ah, finally we have the business plan:

> desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience

> it seems likely that more will consider buying machines instead of always
> renting them

They know companies are insistent on making the mistake of trying to build and
run their own platforms, so they're becoming the company that you can throw
your money at if you're not willing to pay for IBM/Oracle/etc private cloud.

Old folks remember the revolution in distributed computing came from
commodities. The idea was to get a lot of the cheapest resources you could and
loosely tie them together. This was fast, cheap and effective, because
everything was disposable, flexible, open. Even if you hired a dozen
engineers, you saved 3 mil a year on enterprise hardware and software
licenses.

What these folks are betting on is that businesses want to "buy a cloud"
cheaper than they'd get it from a traditional cloud vendor. But to get cheap
hardware and software, you need to strip it down to bare essentials, use the
cheapest, crappiest parts, literally throwing away parts rather than fix them.
Purpose-built hardware and software is the opposite, and of course ignores the
management costs (unless that's going to be part of the payment strategy?).

------
gtirloni
I'd remind everyone of the Openstack-based Nebula company that went bankrupt
overnight and sold the same dream.

You don't bet your on-prem projects on newly born startups.

------
RobLach
Seems like they’re building some custom rack servers for container workloads,
leaning on Rust for system software.

Sounds cool. Should be a good team to pull it off.

------
lr
> Don’t cheat: We believe in playing by the rules of the game, abiding by both
> their letter and their spirit. If we don’t like the rules, we work openly
> and collaboratively to improve them.

I can't help but think this is a huge swipe at companies like Airbnb, Uber,
Lyft, and any of the others that knowingly break laws (or aid others to do so)
and hope they can get away with it, or change the law(s) later.

------
cagenut
This sounds fairly similar to where Hyve [1] and Penguin Computing [2] fit in,
so what does Oxide plan to do differently?

[1][https://hyvesolutions.com/](https://hyvesolutions.com/)
[2][https://www.penguincomputing.com/](https://www.penguincomputing.com/)

~~~
wmf
Hyve and Penguin probably have the same shit AMI UEFI and shit AMI BMC
firmware as every other vendor. It sounds like Oxide is going to write higher-
quality firmware.

------
dylanz
I 80% understand what this company is doing, but I 100% know that this team is
awesome. I'm very much looking forward to more news and progress as it
happens.

------
sdan
After using GCP and AWS for years and paying exorbitant amounts as a student,
I was thinking of just switching to some old Dell rack server.

Glad that Oxide will hopefully allow people and companies to utilize their
infrastructure on components that may not be so old/may be easier to use.

~~~
blondin
well what i am getting from cantrill's article is that they wanna build the
hardware and the software together. i think maybe on-prem contracts with ibm
or dell might not be the target here. in fact open firmware got mentioned a
few times.

i wish them luck, it's a very interesting approach they are taking here.

~~~
sdan
I feel like they could incorporate a lot from
[https://www.openstack.org/](https://www.openstack.org/) for the software
side.

------
cryptozeus
For those confused about the company, this from their homepage :

“Oxide is building a new kind of server.

True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density,
efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running
on-premises compute infrastructure.”

------
holoway
Every thread here about how it’s vanity is bananas. They’re going to build
computers! With software to go with them! So that you can have the same
experience that the hyperscale companies do. It’s a great bet.

This isn’t a blitz to help with fundraising: they already have the money.

They are also hiring - which is why they have a long list of principles and
values, and talk about each other. They’re looking for kindred spirits.

This is a good idea, from people with a history of good ideas.

~~~
Accujack
>They’re going to build computers!

You know they're mostly software people, right?

That's actually irrelevant, though. Even if all three of them were Woz-level
hardware hackers, that's no guarantee that they're bankable success. Being an
impactful software or hardware company takes a team, and in the US at the
moment that team is mostly about financial and legal work, not technical.

We've all seen that "best technical idea" does not usually equal "best
business success"

I wish these folks well, and I'm sure their fans will enjoy following them,
but people acting like this is a major thing for the whole tech industry are
gonna be disappointed.

------
nickpeterson
Definitely have a good bit of work done on that whiteboard I hear naming is
one of the hardest problems in CS.

------
DrScientist
My summary:

1\. They believe there will be a shift back to on-prem, due to cost, improved
security & latency.

2\. They can take commodity hardware designs ( Open Compute Project ) and add
their own software for manageability.

3\. They are big on values, because in the past Bryan got a bit of a rep for
being a bit hard to work with. ( eg
[https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/10/22/why-i-wont-be-
atte...](https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/10/22/why-i-wont-be-attending-
systems-we-love/) )

1\. I'm seeing this in big companies - cloud can be an expensive option if you
are generating your own data on-prem. While the economics might change,
security and latency issues won't so easily. Also cloud is a big risk in that
realistically what is your migration cost to another provider? If that's high,
that's how much your cloud vendor can gouge you before you move ( I like to
call that the Oracle business model ).

2\. Don't know about the hardware, but those guys have a track record on
systems software and Bryan was involved in building similar stuff before in
the storage space ( [http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/zfs-
storag...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/zfs-storage-
family-ds-173093.pdf) )

3\. He is definitely older, perhaps he is wiser.

~~~
buryat
that's pretty bold idea that there'll be a significant shift back to on-prem
given that companies are still migrating into the cloud and the overall cloud
market is predicted to continue growing, but we'll see

[https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-
releases/2019-04-0...](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-
releases/2019-04-02-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-revenue-to-g)

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I remember Gartner being real big on SOAP and Web Services, I was an early
REST convert, about 5 years after my conversion Gartner came to the government
agency were I was working and made one of the guys in charge of lots of SOAP
based initiatives cry by flatly announcing that SOAP had lost and REST had
won. It was 5 years of Yes SOAP until suddenly it wasn't anymore.

So as the other commenter said skate to where the puck is going to be - and
don't rely on Gartner for puck location trends.

------
thrillgore
I literally know nothing about their product, and it seems like both this site
and the various blogs being floated (if not outright promoted, especially
here) are about the founders, and not the product.

I don't care about the team behind it. Give me a tangible product. Or at least
a sense of what the product will look like.

------
morning_gelato
They've also started a podcast focusing on the hardware/software interface
called On the Metal.

[https://oxide.computer/blog/on-the-metal-1-jeff-
rothschild/](https://oxide.computer/blog/on-the-metal-1-jeff-rothschild/)

------
dcminter
The contrasting pictures of the garage and the 'bigger space' are delightful!

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Yeah, but what's the product?

~~~
tiborsaas
"Oxide is building a new kind of server."

------
zxienin
The premise here is that there is market for folks who want to
_preferentially_ be in private DC, rather hyperscalers.

> True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around
> density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to
> everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.

Surely, this influences manageability (and $$). Does it influence the on-
demand provisioning benefit of hyperscalers (achieved at scale) though?

_One_ of the reason me and my team chose hyperscaler is that I get my compute
today, now. Rather having to wait weeks/months for my in-house IT to get for
me.

------
znpy
Bryan Cantrill is basically my role model. I'll be following this.

------
jxramos
> ...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem
> experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more
> in demand than ever.

Great to have options.

------
spamizbad
I’m very excited about this.

There’s definitely a hole in the market for “turnkey private cloud done right”
that isn’t just a massively marked-up bundle of servers that requires
consultants to effectively setup and operate.

Also, If CCIX takes off, along with workload-specific accelerators, they’re in
a much better position to quickly serve those niches rather than waiting 6mo
to rent some cloud instance that might be making all the wrong trade-offs.

------
zer0faith
No where on their website can I find what they are about, how their product
adds business value, what makes them different from everyone else selling
snake oil... basically nothing.. just some flashy graphics, 10$ words and a
company name that makes me think of oxidation (literally rust).. this reeks of
marketing.

------
martyvis
Unless they really want to have him for the laughs, they need to drop Steve
Tuck from the tech podcast. Using "instruction set" in place of "instruction”
and not immediately understanding the forward slash / backslash disconnect
between Windows and everyone else really puts him in a different mindset

------
thr0w__4w4y
Jessie Frazelle is listed as the company's "CPO" \- huh? Isn't that a Star
Wars character? :-P

(Obligatory clarification: of course I'm joking; but is that "Chief People
Officer"?)

~~~
raesene9
My guess would be "Chief Product Officer"

------
hx2a
Bryan Cantrill recently interviewed Arthur Whitney, as discussed in another
thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671918)

~~~
nickpeterson
That was a repost, the interview happened a decade ago.

------
rakefire
People on Twitter seem to just joke around about it...

------
par
who are these guys?

~~~
SwellJoe
Cantrill is probably the most well-known. Long-time Solaris advocate, worked
on Joyent for a long time, etc. You'll find his fingerprints on a lot of
stuff. It'd be hard to find someone more capable of building on-prem cloud
infrastructure at a systems level, I think.

Frazell is pretty well known for Docker and container-oriented stuff. I think
she was at Google for a while, but maybe Microsoft? Somewhere big doing cloud
things, for sure, though.

I don't know the other person. But, I would guess they have to be reasonably
impressive to be on this team.

~~~
ryancnelson
Steve Tuck was the long-time cornerstone of the sales team at Joyent. He was
at Dell before that. He rose to Sales VP, then GM, then COO there. He's not a
kernel coder; he's a tech-business-person, and a cool, noble, and legit one at
that.

------
0x0aff374668
Kinda reminds me of Transmeta. Except they had a product, a shitty one, but a
product. Or Ampere, but they only have one product they inherited and no
flashy names.

Silicon startup challenges are rough. RISC-V is probably the best hope for a
new architecture (hint: its not a new architecture).

~~~
generatorguy
Transmeta was going to be the next big thing, code morphing! Linus was on
board. News on slashdot every day! And then ... some product released but no
needle moved. I wonder if they built something that got outpaced by intel,
needed network effects to take off that never materialized, were ahead of
their time, or just no market for their product?

These guys seem like they’ve identified a market and who their first customers
are going to be.

~~~
happycube
Sort of... Transmeta was basically a VLIW chip optimized to recompile x86
code. The problem was by that point all x86 chips (even plucky little
VIA/Centaur!) were recompiling x86 instructions into RISC-ish ones, and
without sucking up RAM and more importantly memory bandwidth to do it.

So even if the VLIW chip was on paper more powerful/efficient (and I'm not
sure it _was_ ), it just couldn't keep up with doing it in hardware.

------
kick
Almost more interesting than two giants who, for better or worse, have
drastically influenced modern computing practices starting a company, is that
they started a podcast. The former happens every day, and sure, it's exciting,
but how many times have you seen one of these people start a podcast?

~~~
fastball
Everyone and their mother is starting a podcast at the moment.

~~~
k__
This, and most of them are just people who like to hear themselves talk.

------
I_am_tiberius
Why is that nr 1 on hackernews?

------
thr0w__4w4y
Jessie = CPO = ???

~~~
Serow225
I'd guess Chief Product Officer?

------
tamizhar
I apologize if this is a silly question, but what exactly does "computer
company" mean? I read the link. I see "oxide computer" which makes me think,
oh is this one of those newfangled oxide transistor but I clicked a few links
like oxide computer principles of operation hoping to get an idea of what this
is but instead I see some stuff about candor, empathy which is not what I
thought principles meant in this context. I looked through the comments hoping
to see someone explain it but no win there. Oh well. I'm sure someone will
explain it.

~~~
sdan
This is a bad landing page.

1\. Bad HN title (doesn't say anything about what they did about the computer
they made)

2\. Landing page image has some generic background and as far as I saw, no
tangible product, other than some shelves of their latest workspace.

3\. If they could just include some diagram here or there and put some bold
text/say they're building AWS for people/startups, that'd be great and to the
point

Not bashing them, but just some thoughts I had about their presentation.

Regardless, I'm extremely excited for what they're building. Been waiting for
something like this to pop up.

~~~
dmix
It's amazing it has >400 upvotes at all.

~~~
wyldfire
I suspect upvoters have some context that's implied by knowing the domain of
these founders or their previous work.

------
kev009
This is the funniest thing I've seen all day. What a hoot.

Look at the job req for "hardware engineer": they have no idea how to solicit
EEs or what they are even looking for on the _most_ important roles for even
doing something in this space (and none of the personalities have skills or
credibility in). That they duped a VC into funding this is side-splitting
hilarious and a sign of impending correction in tech.

~~~
dang
Please don't be a jerk on HN. Even if you don't feel you owe the people you're
attacking any better, you do owe this community better if you're posting here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
weego
Are these people of note? The title could be a lot more contextually relevant

~~~
kick
Cantrill is one of the people responsible for dtrace, and more or less the
only Sun-alumni who's not retired or disappeared (a lot of them stopped
blogging when Oracle killed the Sun blogging culture and site/killed Sun). He
also was the CTO of Joyent.

Frazelle was one of the people responsible for Docker.

I think Tuck is a finance guy who used to be a sysadmin? And he was COO of
Joyent for a while, apparently.

~~~
streb-lo
Care to shed some light on internet history?

How did Oracle kill the Sun blogging culture? What/Who was the Sun blogging
culture?

~~~
ilikejam
Engineers blogging about Solaris etc. Internals, gotchas, upcoming things,
heads-ups on problems. The patching guys' blog was particularly useful in the
face of Solaris' atrocious packaging utils, for example.

There was a _huge_ amount of official-unofficial documentation in the blogs
that disappeared from the Sun site when Oracle ran its bulldozer through it.

------
lfowles
Right now all three accounts of this are adjacent news items on HN. Heh.

~~~
malvosenior
I'm really curious why. This seems like an ok enough idea but hardly anything
innovative. Is it just because the founders are bloggers and have a large
following that it's getting traction? There's barely a description of what the
product will be.

~~~
chx
Calling these founders bloggers is perhaps true in the strictest sense of the
word, as in they surely have blogs but that's not why some people perk up at
this news.

Jessie Frazelle did some serious Docker work, went on to work on Kubernetes,
Hyper-V, a brief stint at Github saw her working on their Actions product.

Bryan Cantrill was working on the Solaris kernel for a decade, his dtrace is
particularly famous. And then he was CTO at Joyent. You maybe have heard one
of the projects they helped with called node.js?

------
malvosenior
I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed
every anti-pattern they could find into this startup. It's focus is entirely
on the personalities involved and not at all on the product. They talk about
their cool new office, funding, they have a 50 point list on values, they have
a podcast, a newsletter...

Yet there's essentially nothing about what the product is (that being the only
thing most people care about). This reminds me of first time founders who
can't wait to get "CEO" business cards. Worry about the product first, last
and in-between. The rest is just there to signal to us that your priorities
aren't in the right place.

~~~
jmartrican
Agreed. I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need
here for a company I invest in. The company currently manages thousands of
hosts and the cloud is eating into their profits. The hardware out there is
way to expensive (or a bad job was done searching) to move away from the
cloud. If they can provide good hardware that would allow the thousands of
host company to save money if they did it on their own, then we would be
interested in looking into it.

Off the top of my head of what would be required besides just cheap hardware.
1) Cloud like software to manage it or k8s native support. I don't know
exactly how that would be done, but the administrative costs of using this
hardware can't be so high as to make the cloud a more viable option. 2) Some
options for network access. Cloud does not just provide VM's but the
underlying reliable network with multiple redundant pipes. Comcast Internet
access might be good enough, but some customers might require large redundant
pipes. While they might NOT need to solve this themselves, they should make
sure that the market does provide solutions that when taken into account,
allows for cheaper than cloud solutions. 3) Physical location... same as item
2 but for physical location of the hardware.

I remember back in the day managing colos. It really sucked. It was not just
hardware costs that sucked. They should just consider that.

~~~
Accujack
> I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here
> for a company I invest in.

This is exactly how any "WeWork" type company sucks in investors. You'd just
ignore the stupid out of hand except that it would be _so nice_ to believe
that if this company is on the level and IF their product does what they say
it will and _IF_ they deliver it in a reasonable time frame then it will solve
the problem and somehow make money for investors.

Forget the names and reputations of the people involved... if three random
people came up to you at a conference and said "We've formed a company to
solve problem X!", wouldn't you wait until they showed an actual product to
even think about potentially making decisions based on what they might do?

~~~
asdf21
You're asking VCs to disregard social proof and FOMO, which will never happen,
as those are the main things they rely on.

------
jakebasile
Feeding their index through [Bullshit.js][1] is amusing.

[1]:
[https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/](https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/)

~~~
znpy
thanks for letting me discover this little gem, it's a game changer

------
markbnine
Do you ever get that creepy feeling that HN is being used for guerrilla
advertising?

~~~
steveklabnik
I submitted this post because I know both Jessie and Bryan, and am really
excited about what they're doing here. They didn't ask me to post at all.

~~~
pvg
What _are_ they doing here? It's difficult to tell from the thing you've
linked.

~~~
steveklabnik
Frankly, for me, "Jessie and Bryan are going to start selling computers" is
enough for me to get excited about it. I'm not sure I could give you an in-
depth rundown, because well, I'm not privy to any information, and obviously
this announcement is a bit light on details. Some quotes from both of their
posts that I think are important:

> hardware and software should each be built with the other in mind.

> even as the world is moving (or has moved) to elastic, API-driven computing,
> there remain good reasons to run on one’s own equipment!

> Over the last year, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time talking
> with folks who are currently running workloads on premises. The consensus
> from all my conversations has been that everyone setting up infrastructure
> themselves is in a great deal of pain and they have been largely neglected
> by any existing vendor. All these folks have very good reasons for running
> on premises that include security, strategic reasons like latency,
> specialized workloads, or the reality that the unit economics of running at
> their scale in the cloud are unsustainable.

> the world needed a company to develop and deliver integrated, hyperscaler-
> class infrastructure to the broader market — that we needed to start a
> computer company.

> Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call
> “infrastructure privilege” since they long ago decided they could build
> their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity
> vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to
> everyone else!

> could we find an investor who saw what we saw in Oxide? Fortunately, the
> answer to this question had been emphatic and unequivocal: [yes]

------
smlacy
So this is just Box 2.0 Signature Edition, right?

------
mmoez
Was the garage actually used?

Or was it just a folkloric step that is now required by any computer company
to emulate other successes in Silicon Valley?

~~~
sp332
The post has a photo of the actual garage in use.
[https://blog.jessfraz.com/img/garage.jpg](https://blog.jessfraz.com/img/garage.jpg)
It specifically says: "In typical cliche computer company fashion we have been
_working out of my garage._ "

~~~
mumblemumble
Curious what they're doing with all those 3.5" and 5.25" floppies.

~~~
bliteben
props from the last startup to use this set

------
mikl
> Jessie Frazelle, Bryan Cantrill, and Steve Tuck

Are we supposed to know who those people are?

I’m sure they are great guys, but trying to trade on your name kinda requires
you to be well known first.

I’ll be interested to read it once they can say something concrete about what
they’re building.

~~~
brandly
Jessie is not a guy.

------
briandear
Should I know who these people are?

------
asdfq1234
Just what the world needs. Another computer company.

------
ipoopatwork
That office space [1] looks awful. Why is everything an open space theses
days?

[1] [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-
garage/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/)

~~~
couchand
Looks like it's still being built out in that picture. For their sake,
hopefully they remember to put up some walls.

------
m00dy
Nothing but a great product will save you guys.

------
Iwan-Zotow
Messrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs are proud to present the
Marauder's Map

------
outside1234
This is great proof that what many startups are are collections of talent -
not products - that are aqui hires

------
jasoneckert
Trying to figure out what this company does from their website is
fundamentally the same as trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

------
adamnemecek
"While we don’t specify experience levels with particular languages or tools,
you’ve almost certainly done work in C and assembly – and you have probably
started to play with Rust if you haven’t already outright fallen in love with
it."

Pumped about Rust.

------
W-Stool
Honest question: what is this company trying to do that buying a couple of
blade chassis full of blades, a bunch of VMware licenses, and a SAN won't do?
I truly don't get it.

------
briandear
Writing a biography of a company that doesn’t have a product is a bit trite.

When you ship a product, then years later you talk about the history. Right
now it like a near live stream of just how old-school “computery” their new
company is.

I actually hope they are successful. I would love it if they execute on all
the bullshit they are hyping — but I am doubtful because I have seen this
pattern over and over: people talk about changing the world before they
actually do — never do.

------
rchaud
If I'd just read the post and not clicked the homepage, I'd have no idea what
they mean by "computer company". Turns out it's some boring B2B server thing.

Does it annoy anyone else to see blog posts where the first paragraph is a
bunch of links to other posts? The first paragraph should give the reader at
least some idea of what the main idea is. If the material has been covered in
detail elsewhere, then post those links at the bottom of the post.

------
xwdv
Not sure who any of these people are, or what exactly their “computer company”
sells. Do they custom build computers like Falcon Northwest or System76 or
something? People need to improve their skills at conveying information; fast
and efficiently.

~~~
pimterry
The site homepage (rather than the launch announcement) is a bit clearer about
their plan: [https://oxide.computer/](https://oxide.computer/)

> Hyperscaler infrastructure for the rest of us

> Oxide is building a new kind of server.

> True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around
> density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to
> everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.

They're building servers, for people who run their own compute infrastructure.

~~~
xwdv
A better title then would be “Oxide Computer to build servers for compute
infrastructures.”

~~~
kick
That's far less explanatory.

~~~
xwdv
Why? It names the company and what they do and what they sell for.

The current title conveys 0 useful information. Don’t know who those people
are and a “computer company” could be anything.

~~~
tonyarkles
The discussions about the title are interesting to me. I have followed both
Jessie and Bryan for years, and seeing their names together and "computer
company" got me exceptionally excited!

~~~
xwdv
If you don’t know those people, the entire title falls flat. Imagine if it was
just some random people starting a computer company, which could be damn near
anything.

------
briandear
I am not sure why this is news. Anyone can say they started a company. It’s
news when someone actually ships a product. Until then, it’s literally nothing
but talk. Apple Computer delivered an actual product April 1, 1976 and didn’t
even incorporate until 1977. They certainly didn’t spend a year talking about
being a computer company before shipping a product. These “we are starting a
computer company!!” posts are useless beyond just creating vapid hype. Wasn’t
there a companion post on how they started this in a garage? Let’s get real,
until you ship a product, you don’t have a company, you have a blog and
forcing the “started in a garage ! [omg, omg!]” just seems like a contrived
attempt at capturing old-school, Silicon Valley magic.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix etc. didn’t spend time talking about
their new company — the companies just sort of happened as a result of having
a product to sell.

Get back to us when there is actually something people can buy that solves a
real problem.

~~~
rchaud
They may be looking for funding. Can't really think of why else they'd need to
announce something that's currently vaporware.

~~~
bryanlarsen
It sounds like they have the funding. The vaporware hype is to attract
employees, AFAICT.

~~~
rchaud
Ah, I didn't think of it as a hiring pitch. Yes, that makes sense.

------
mongol
I am not so fond of the word "privilege" in this context. A sign of the times,
I guess.

