> While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision.
This is a bland PR oriented statement. I was roughly expecting this level of details from the speaker.
The one statement feels rather bland: "those advances have been denied to the mass market"
What does this mean?
It was not denied, they were just too complex for mass market. People are happy to pay AWS so that they can worry not the machines, and write JS code from day one.
No, they've been denied: I elaborate on this in the talk, but if you look at (say) an OCP-based system (e.g., Facebook's Tioga Pass[1]), the innovations in that system are simply not available for any price to the enterprise buyer. And yes, those buyers emphatically do exist -- and no, they are certainly not everyone deploying on elastic infrastructure.
For me as a systems engineer and systems administrator appliances like VMware VxRail are totally infuriating at times. Especially the deeply object oriented design of their APIs that really hinders you implementing anything not already present in Ansible or Terraform in a reasonable amount of time yourself. I could fill a talk ranting. They really should take a hint from Rich Hickey and stuff like "Simple made easy" even if they don't write any Clojure at all.
In the end, the less sophisticated Citrix XenServer we use now for about 10 years seems to be more hackable in some ways.
The only advantage these hyperscale purpose built computing platforms provide is elimination of the profit taken by HP, IBM, Dell, etc.
They are complaining about the PC heritage in the server world- this is actually a huge convenience in that it is standardized hardware (so for example, it's easy to install any software made for PCs on them, including Linux). The cost of this compatibility is not very much these days (in terms of silicon area).
Blade servers had centralized power supplies since forever ago..
Also you can certainly get servers without CD drives :-) Rack front and back panel area is actually a limited commodity, so for example many modern servers are just packed with 2.5 inch drives..
I thought a number of vendors sell "OCP Accepted" products that use the OCP designs?
I've not yet watched the presentation, and I'm not familiar with this stuff, so apologies if I'm missing something, but what is the difference between buying a server from Oxide and buying e.g. https://www.opencompute.org/products/109/wiwynn-tioga-pass-a... (from one of the vendors on the right)?
There was always a need of making something commercially successful. But there needs to be proportional demand to justify.
OCP cannot produce their products to mass market unless there is a strong demand. Certainly it looks like market mainstream is not too passionate about building or managing their machines.
I don't deny that some people, in any circumstances, would demand different offerings from the market mainstream.
And I am totally understanding why such statement like "a was denied to b" was used here.
I was merely stating, for mass market, there is no serious demand for what's claimed to be denied from them. And I am stating that from a more technical perspective nor a marketing or PR one. (And I am very positive about the necessity of marketing and PR)
There are so many old (and frankly even new) line of business applications, where the developers haven't considered among other things laws of physics like speed of light in optical fiber much. These systems (client+server applications) tend to run much better on premise. The applications are often not automated much, aren't really secured that well (so you would probably need a VPN to the cloud to run it safely) and the bandwidth of internet connections at some of these companies are not really suitable for clients on premise and servers in the cloud anyway. You are lucky, if the synchronization to a different location works well enough.
Also, cloud is very costly if you don't use the up and especially down scaling because your application/ infrastructure wasn't really designed for that. Also if you buy some new machine for the factory it usually comes with software (usually MS Windows Server + MS SQL Server + some machine control software) that has hardware requirements that don't really fit well with cloud pricing. Such machines tend to run for decades and the company certainly hasn't thought about being efficient with computing resources on the server. On premise hardware isn't that costly if you consider these factors, if the supplier cannot secure the machine properly, you slap it into its own VLAN and write an ACL for the RDP access (because that is how it is) and are done with it. Basically dedicated Gigabit speed with very little latency for any communication between the clients and the server. Remember, you are almost lucky if a Windows Update doesn't break the software/ software license on the server or the client...
In the current modular[1] structure of the industry where the server is a product and the network is a separate product and the hypervisor is yet another product etc, there's no demand for components that aren't compatible with the morass of existing standards. So yeah, there isn't enough demand for OCP servers and such.
It sounds like Oxide is trying to break out of that by providing the whole stack.
We have serious vendor lock-in now, where a very few companies are gatekeepers to almost any business that runs on the internet.
And their margins are _enormous_ on this business. It ends up costing much, much more to pay them to run our machines for us.
And increasingly, the expertise to do this is being consolidated in these companies, so the talent available to pursue any other way is diminishing as new grads never learn about the magic places their code runs.
The reliability outcomes are nearly the same, despite the deferral to their expertise.
Labor savings b/c you don't to learn about provisioning your own machines? Not much. AWS is so sophisticated you need to develop a nearly equivalent amount of (non-portable) expertise to actually operate it well. Remember, the alternative isn't just rack your own, it's... dedicated hosting! And lots of other options with less lock-in and more standards.
It's sort of frightening how complicit the broader technology industry is in this power consolidation.
Vendors refuses to take part in standardization if they absolutely have the leverage.
Remember Amazon's reluctance in joining the CNCF and container groups?
By stating you are not happy, Amazon is perfectly ready to do what ever they can to please you, ad stated in their "customer obsession" (and I assure that that statement is as sincere as any human stating any commitment).
But back to the point, people in mass market primarily are no longer interested in managing machines, let alone building themselves.
