One benefit is that they're competing in an industry where the time to get a sled up and running for compute can be measured in weeks (they say they've heard up to 90 days) whereas their solution is basically plug and play - Bryan was trying to get Steve to admit set up took "hours" whereas Steve was hedging and saying customers could get started "within a week."
They go into more details on their podcast, and this section in particular covers the bootstrap time: https://youtu.be/5P5Mk_IggE0?t=3381 Pretty fascinating stuff.
Do I have it right that they ship their own hypervisor (that's based on maybe Solaris, not KVM) as firmware? Let's assume a very small team can compete on a technical level, it still seems like it could cut out a lot of the potential market.
I can't imagine that large cloud / "web scale" companies would want that. Most want a fair bit of control of their own hypervisor and management stacks based around KVM. And "enterprise" type companies are going to have issues with certification I would have thought -- will RedHat, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc certify their supported products on top of this hypervisor? Seems like a difficult and expensive process.
So what's left? Companies that support their own virtual machine software but don't support their own hypervisor and don't like what's available from vmware or Microsoft or RedHat. A small niche. Or are my assumptions wrong?
I think quite often when we assume 'most want to fair bit of control' is just not true. Enterprises want something that just works, they want control if they can't have something that just works.
If you have a team that is struggling building an internal cloud with all this control (and problems) and all this commodity hardware (and its problems) then maybe they would be happy to switch to something that just works.
> And "enterprise" type companies are going to have issues with certification I would have thought -- will RedHat, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc certify their supported products on top of this hypervisor? Seems like a difficult and expensive process.
If that was the case and nobody running any of these would run their rack, then I wouldn't think they would not have received any funding. But I don't know enough about these certification process to really comment.
> Companies that support their own virtual machine software but don't support their own hypervisor and don't like what's available from vmware or Microsoft or RedHat
Non of these come with a fully integrated rack.
The competition would be somebody willing to buy a rack of Dell servers with VMWare software. Or somebody willing to buy a rack of Dell server and then use RedHat and set up all their own cloud style infrastructure.
> I think quite often when we assume 'most want to fair bit of control' is just not true. Enterprises want something that just works, they want control if they can't have something that just works.
That's not what I'm assuming here. Read carefully, I divide the market into 3 categories. Those who support their own VM image software and hypervisors, those who support neither, and those who support VM image but not hypervisor.
First is Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like (and it's not an assumption we can see their public contributions to KVM, QEMU, etc., and hear their talks about some of what they use internally). Second is "enterprise" who wants something that just works. Third is ? and would they want to support their software on a niche hypervisor?
> If that was the case and nobody running any of these would run their rack, then I wouldn't think they would not have received any funding. But I don't know enough about these certification process to really comment.
Well it is the case that enterprise (supported) software is not just supported on any hypervisor. https://access.redhat.com/articles/973163 RHEL runs on their own KVM as well as MS, VMware, some cloud vendors. Some application software also gets certified to hardware and hypervisors, not just operating system (e.g., SAP does this).
> Non of these come with a fully integrated rack.
It's not fully integrated if it doesn't come with the guest software though, is it?
> The competition would be somebody willing to buy a rack of Dell servers with VMWare software. Or somebody willing to buy a rack of Dell server and then use RedHat and set up all their own cloud style infrastructure.
Right. And the problem for Oxide is that the competition will have fully certified and supported operating system and application software for their virtual machines.
The hypervisor is based on Bhyve from FreeBSD + Propolis in user space. Illumos actually has/ had KVM and there is a talk by Bryan Cantrill where he speaks about the porting effort. All of that information is readily searchable.
They go into more details on their podcast, and this section in particular covers the bootstrap time: https://youtu.be/5P5Mk_IggE0?t=3381 Pretty fascinating stuff.