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 A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price.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.
Correct. I work at SoftIron. We have several HyperCloud systems in production right now. SI has been shipping purpose-built storage systems for years as the root-comment suggests, but HyperCloud (which is closer to Oxide's product) has been in production systems in defense, banking, internationally for well over a year now.
Your webpage is an ocean of marketing fluff and buzzwords. It's not clear that you have a product that competes with Oxide. It's not even clear how you're different than Dell or HP.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38026306 and other related threads. Oxide's product is a rack you plug in and you're done. You don't have to rack a bunch of servers yourself and cable them.
I've been running my 12th Gen Intel Framework for just over a year (since I got it) with Linux (KDE Neon). Bluetooth, expansion cards, thunderbolt, wifi - literally no issues. I haven't even had to fiddle with it. I use it all day for work (software engineering - lots of VM's and browser tabs) and all evening for Minecraft and movies. When I'm at my desk at home it's plugged in to a Thunderbolt 4 dock driving two monitors and getting Gigabit network speed.
Before that I had a brand new Dell XPS 13, which again I had for a little over a year, running KDE Neon. It wasn't used for work as much, but again it worked perfectly fine, including the touch screen I didn't even want on it (okay- a major issue was the battery life, which was atrocious).
This is nonsense. The uploader is not necessarily the copyright holder of the code. The uploader is not necessarily in a position to grant extra rights above the actual license.
What happens if someone else uploads my code to github?
What happens if proprietary code is uploaded to github?
What happens if national secrets are posted to github?
In all of those cases, the person doing the upload does not "own" the content, nor did they choose the license.
There is no reasonable read of a ToS agreement that would allow Microsoft/Github extra rights to that content.
I've lived in San Diego most of my life, with a few years in Berkeley. Literally everyone says "the 5" in SD, and I was consistently ribbed for saying it in the Bay Area.
Edit: oh and "The City" === san Francisco drove me nuts, too.
My God, you're right. With such poor judgement, they might someday do something really awful like try to force remote attestation into the web at large.
It doesn't have to be a technical strategy, but a UX path to EEE.
I've been thinking about this in terms of Lemmy (also built on ActivityPub), which I understand isn't currently on the table for interop (but if Facebook is after Twitter's lunch, why shouldn't they be after Reddit's). It could even be the same application - Kbin is another AP service which has separate tabs for "link aggregation" and "microblogging" (Reddit and Twitter, respectively).
With Lemmy, the way a large corp could come in and push it around is by simply creating it's own version of the top 100 (or N, whatever) communities, and automatically subscribing users into them based on their interests (already known, due to existing accounts/profiles elsewhere). c/linux on lemmy.ml has ~6k subscribers, and is the largest Linux community on Lemmy, afaict. It's not unreasonable to think a large corp willing to pull in its existing userbase couldn't increase that by an order of magnitude in very short order. Overnight, those communities become the place where conversations are happening on those topics (maybe even with some pre-seeded content) and the existing lemmy communities stagnate.
Fast forward a while and one day BigCorp decides to pull the plug. Existing non-BigCorp Lemmy users are now separated from the communities they've been in and need to create BigCorp accounts. You could argue that those non-BigCorp Lemmy users are no worse off than they are pre-BigCorp-federation, but they're effectively migrating their communities all over again.
As far as why, I think it's pretty invaluable for Facebook to:
1) appear to be "playing ball" from a regulatory aspect
2) eat a competitor's lunch
3) control a (potentially!) up and coming federated service
> For example, Meta has made multiple public statements about federation.
These are worth nothing, though?
The skepticism is informed by looking at the history of the company, not just what they're saying right now.
FWIW, I do think they will federate eventually. I don't think they'll do so because they want user accounts to actually move around, etc, etc. Strategically, it's valuable to keep a handle on the Fediverse, since they're big enough to exert control over it should they so choose, and they can be better positioned to do so if they start from a position of being federated.
Larger displays are not excluded as a possibility, but I like the current size for placing it on the desk.
Also, larger displays are disproportionately expensive, and the display is already the main cost driver.
SoftIron | Software Engineers, Systems Engineers | International | REMOTE or ONSITE | https://softiron.com/
Edit: Hey all, we got an overwhelming amount of great applications, so we've temporarily closed this down. We'll re-open if we don't find a match.
We produce vertically-aligned, on-prem, clustered, private cloud appliance. We design the hardware (motherboard, BMC, etc) and write the software (obviously integrating open source components where it makes sense eg. KVM, but also writing our own). Everything comes from a single vendor - us. The result is a cloud-like experience with no finger pointing and no shoe-horning as it was all built to work together. We have offices around the world, but fully remote is great, too.
Marketing-y blurb follows:
We’re building a globally distributed, locally embedded organisation that enables our Softies to be located in the place they live and work the best. Rather than plunder the global talent pool to relocate to Silicon Valley (though you can if you want) you can be where you do your best work and participate in our global community of Softies using platforms we’ve built or customised to make that possible.
As a venture backed company we’re growing and changing fast, and in some cases you could get the chance to build or influence that growth in ways not possible in more traditional businesses. We don’t just accept the “industry norm” and constantly challenge ourselves to do things better, often working at the leading edge of where IT infrastructure and open source are heading.
Obviously it’s much better to ask here and wait for an official response as you have done, but if for any reason that answer doesn’t come, you might look up Rob, the VP of Engineering. It somewhat matches the HN handle, and regardless, he should know who to put you in contact with.
I was being obtuse on purpose so that young ones and those from more goal-seeking cultures wouldn't spam, but I was imagining a google search leading to a LinkedIn profile.
My apologies, I added my email to my profile and thought it was public. Didn't see the note about adding it to the 'about' section. I've updated that now and I'll email you.
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.