I really wish oxide had a Homelab/consumer centric offering!
Spec wise, some low power systems like an Intel NUC, LattePanda Sigma, or Zimaboard. You could fit 3/4 of them in a single 1u with a shared power supply. They could even offer a full 1u with desktop grade chips on the same sleds.
I have thought about building one myself, but it's a large investment of time that I can't seem to find lately.
It would be great if Oxide had something like Canonical's "Orange Box"/cloud-in-a-box for homelabs, evaluation, training (in the management bits) - and hobby work loads!
I'd imagine they'll get to that eventually, these types of companies generally start at enterprise level because that's the most profitable and requires closing smaller numbers of deals. Once the product is proven and their support infrastructure is in place they can go for other market segments to try and maximize revenue
It's not just about maximizing revenue, it's also about getting it into developer hands early (homelabs, side projects, college students, etc) so they can become familiar with it, and become an advocate for it within their company. Cloudflare is a good example of this.
Even just a medium business offering would be great. I'd love to not have to use Dell or HP gear-- anything to get away from the cobbled-together stack of legacy IBM PC compatibility and third-party ODM/OEM stuff glue-and-taped together by the vendor.
On prem. Reliable and inexpensive network connectivity they has any resemblance to a 10G LAN doesn't exist where I am.
I work with some businesses who need very, very reliable, high-bandwidth, and low latency connectivity to their data. The amortized cost of on-prem beats the cost of any off-prem offering as soon as the cost of the necessary connectivity is factoted-in.
AWS Outposts is the solution. I like Oxide but people seem to be blind to the actual competition when they focus on Dell as the competitor. AWS has been shipping Outposts racks for years. All prices are public on their website and you can order it today. Nearly every configuration is sub-$500k. Fully managed and AWS supports the entire stack; no buck-passing among vendors, same as Oxide.
I’m not sure where his customers are, but Outpost up/downlinks are supposed to to be at least 1gbit, and they don’t behave well in situations where the latency to the paired region is high. EBS lazy loading blocks is great in region but awful when your ping is 300ms.
I'm talking shops who spend $200-$500K on servers and storage, not north of $1M (which is where this Oxide gear lives). Something like a 1/4 scale Oxide rack, perhaps.
I work at SoftIron, another startup in this space. Our HyperCloud product might be interesting for you. I'm not in sales, so I can't comment on the prices, but I'd guess we're much more competitive since you don't actually need to buy an entire rack of our gear at a time.
That said, where this product-space gets tough is actually scaling it down. It's pretty challenging to create something that is remotely stable/functional in a homelab (space/power/money) budget. Three servers and a switch would probably be the bare minimum. We (and I'm sure Oxide :) scale up like a dream.
This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?
If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with.
A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc.
So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there.
It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated.
Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.
I'm really thinking mostly about the hardware part here, and maybe just enough layers of the stack to feel like an integrated hardware setup. Let the nerds play with whatever software they want above that.
To go ahead and dream a bit:
I'd hope for an online configurator like the one SoftIron's HyperCloud has [1] but instead of "talk to a sales rep", show a price for what you just configured, like you're configuring a macbook.
Relatedly, there should be a standard rack form factor in the size category of NUCs and Mac Minis, rather than having to go all the way to the 19 inch monster racks that medium to large businesses use. If it were nailed down to the point of being able to blind mate (just learned that term from Oxide's article here!) gear into it, that would be kind of perfect.
Unfortunately they are not planning home lab things anytime soon, per a recent podcast episode [0].
If you want to play around with their Hubris OS: "You wanna buy an STM32H753 eval board. You can download Hubris, and then you’ve got – you’ve got an Oxide computer. You have it for 20 bucks.”
Not 1U but perhaps a box design that isn’t noisy like a pizza box server.
Don’t know if oxide would want or be able to compete in the low cost market but a bigger a more expensive desktop/workstation as a mini homelab cloud could be a great option to get people trained on the oxide platform.
I agree with you, but I think the idea is that the underlying storage engine affords you functionality that you can't mimic yourself / elsewhere and therefore your capabilities to leave are limited.
You're always "locked in" to some degree and it's an almost worthless thing to invest into if you never actually need to actually migrate off.
I really wish there was a device like this that could be used as a type of "blade server" that could be inserted into a standard 1u/2u short-depth rack mounted chassis. That would let me re-use my existing 8u wallmounted rack instead of a shelf with zip-ties.
A simple explanation is that you borrow a certain number of stocks, sell it, and re-buy at some point in the future (at a lower price hopefully) to return the number of stocks you borrowed.
Imagine you think widgets that are worth $1 today are going to be worth $0.50 tomorrow. You say to me, "Hey jpdb, can I borrow 100 widgets and give them back to you tomorrow?" I say sure and you turn around and sell those widgets. Tomorrow, we meet up and you take your $100 and buy 100 widgets for the new price of $0.50 each. You return the 100 widgets you borrowed and you now have $50 in your pocket. In this example you have "shorted" widgets.
> One of my colleagues keeps repeating “reliability is our number one feature”.
I think reliability is the #1 feature at any stage because if you're unavailable, you're at best useless and more than likely you are actively harmful because your users have an expectation.
However, if you're unavailable outside of times customers don't expect you to be there then you're not actually unavailable. This is more likely for an early stage start-up, but you don't typically choose or know when you're expected to be available nor do you always get to choose when you're unavailable.
> I suspect if a Service Mesh is ultimately shown to have broad value, one will make it's way into the K8S core
I'm not so sure. I suspect it'll follow the same roadmap as Gateway API, which it already kind of is with the Service Mesh Interface (https://smi-spec.io/)
Indeed, all major Service Meshes solution for Kubernetes implements (at least some part) the SMI specification.
There is a group composed of these players working actively on making such spec a standard.
Understanding these few CRDs give great insights on what do expect from a Service mesh and how thinks are typically articulated.
I just wrote something extremely similar, but it's only internal right now.
I personally find that the service mesh value-prop is hard to justify for a serverless stack (mostly Cloud Run, but AWS Lambda too probably), and in situations where your services are mostly all in the same language and you can bake the features into libraries that are much easier to import.
Observability is a great example of this. In serverless-land, you're already getting the standard HTTP metrics (ex request count, response codes, latency, etc), tracing, and standard HTTP request logging "for free."
> I personally find that the service mesh value-prop is hard to justify for a serverless stack (mostly Cloud Run, but AWS Lambda too probably), and in situations where your services are mostly all in the same language and you can bake the features into libraries that are much easier to import.
If you’re running server less you already have 90% of what you’d get from a service mesh.
I will tell you that having seen what happens in big companies, baking distributed concerns into libraries always ends in disaster long after you’re gone.
When you have a piece of code deployed in 200 separate apps, every change requires tons of project management.
Spec wise, some low power systems like an Intel NUC, LattePanda Sigma, or Zimaboard. You could fit 3/4 of them in a single 1u with a shared power supply. They could even offer a full 1u with desktop grade chips on the same sleds.
I have thought about building one myself, but it's a large investment of time that I can't seem to find lately.