How are we able to air cool the rack? FAQ Friday #52

Release 20 is LIVE & bringing even more network performance. Jumbo frame support for external networks ( already used internally) raises instance MTU from 1500 to 8500 bytes, substantial for network IO-intensive workloads, plus additional self-service update and block storage services goodness.

How is Oxide different from hyperscaler infrastructure? FAQ Friday #51

🦀 NEWLY ANNOUNCED Keynote Speaker: @bcantrill.bsky.social, CTO @oxide.computer On Sept 10, Bryan shares a glimpse into 7 years in with #rustlang. Bryan shares the honest arc: infatuation, honeymoon, ups, downs, and what Rust still needs. 🔗 sched.co/2KHuE Register: bit.ly/4eUTQ1g #rustconf

we all just got a raise @oxide.computer

"@oxide.computer builds mainframes for zoomers" is still my favorite way to describe where I work. oxide.computer/faq-friday/i... for a better explanation from @matthewsanabria.com :D

On this week's Oxide and Friends, @bcantrill.bsky.social and I were joined by @benleonard.bsky.social to talk about the amazing Oxide rack explorer (explorer.oxide.computer) he designed, turning CAD models into a 3D interactive site.

Why can't commodity server vendors just do what we've done? FAQ Friday #50

Recently, @oxide.computer rolled out an eye-popping 3D rack explorer at explorer.oxide.computer. Today, @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by designer extraordinaire, @benleonard.bsky.social, to describe the process behind realizing this dream! Join us, 2p Pacific discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

Tonight at the @oaklandballers.bsky.social game (sponsored by @oxide.computer!), my 19-year-old son and I will live out a shared dream: to go at it in the Knockerball Knockout in the 5th inning break. Come for the baseball -- but stay to watch me get knocked on my ass! tickets.oaklandballers.com

When you’re building distributed systems from the ground up, every layer is a place where you can make the network faster. But every slowdown is a problem you own. sgkaram.bsky.social just pushed his first (of many) Oxide blogs on tuning network performance across an Oxide system. buff.ly/XV9kmIW

We love Rust for how much the compiler helps enforce safety. But sometimes it's up to us to uphold the complex--and often unclear--expectations of what constitutes safety on our own. @sunshowers.io, joined me and @bcantrill.bsky.social to talk about the hardest type of unsafe Rust.

What is Oxide doing about System Management Mode (SMM)? FAQ Friday #49

@oxide.computer is actively updating the infrastructure running my website, my Bluesky PDS, and my Git server. All of those applications remain up through the update. Let's talk about why.

The B's and @oxide.computer are bringing together engineers, designers, developers, builders, baseball minds, and creative technologists THIS SATURDAY for a one-day hackathon. 💻 How can technology make baseball more accessible, useful, affordable, and fun? RSVP 🎟️ www.eventbrite.com/e/ballers-x-...

Our stuff is so smooth

ICYMI, @sunshowers.io had a terrific blog entry last week -- and today, she joins @ahl.bsky.social and me on Oxide and Friends to discuss the blog entry, the work behind it, and the reaction to it. Join us, 5p Pacific today! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

First day back at work from paternity leave. I created a new Kubernetes cluster running on @oxide.computer that runs my: - Personal Website - Personal Data Server (PDS) - Tangled Knot Love seeing our integrations come together. I gotta write a blog post about it all.

Why use Oxide instead of the public cloud? FAQ Friday #48

When Rain writes about Rust, you should read it.

iddqd, or the hardest kind of unsafe Rust. My first post for the @oxide.computer blog! Goes deep into the pitfalls of unsafe Rust and how to reason about it. A lot of labor went into the post -- please have a read! oxide.computer/blog/iddqd-u...

my futurelock talk from #tokioconf is up! check it out, enjoy the story of a nightmare bug we saw at @oxide.computer

I know this is (supposed to be) marketing. But all that is true. I think it’s gotten significantly better but the amount of oddities in the stack you will have to own is long. And I am not even talking about the BMC, but whatever runs on switches, routers to flashing fiber optics etc.. painful af.

I mean I had certain games crash the computer just cause the microcode being out of date. I wish I could have an Oxide Rack for Home Use

I spent longer than I’d like to admit chasing firmware on my homelab cluster. Updated the BIOS to get network issues sorted for a couple nodes, then discover the fan controller were corrupted. every fix was its own incantation of deprecated installers 🫠

Having spent a good amount of time on a team managing k8s on bare metal, this tracks. Most of the time the issues were failures between k8s components and the underlying compute/network/storage, not in k8s itself, which is a lot harder to google for.

Kubernetes on bare-metal is rough. However, I love that my team gets to build Kubernetes integrations for Oxide on top of such an amazing product. Our goal is to make it a no-brainer to choose Oxide.

We have all Kubernetes on bare metal on our home network, and this is all true. Luckily it's not a production environment though!

I endorse this message.

I feel like this post is directed straight at me and my previous team at $EMPLOYER.

Can't I just build my own cloud computer? FAQ Friday #47

Last week, @bcantrill.bsky.social were joined again by the founders of the @oaklandballers.bsky.social--that's right, another baseball episode! @oxide.computer is excited to announce both our sponsorship of the Ballers and our upcoming joint, baseball/tech hackathon!

One of the things I love about Oxide is our Demo Friday, where some of us demo good error messages and get hoots and hollers. Demos, generally speaking, are usually of the happy path

The thing I'd add is I think this also represents our empathy for datacenter technicians: the people who have to deal with the unnecessarily loud fans every day, and who get to enjoy a that much quieter environment as a result of our tighter design

bryan says it's more about the power efficiency but we all know it's so we can put oxide racks in our bedrooms and still sleep at night

My personal website now runs on Oxide Computer Company by dogfooding my team's Kubernetes integrations. Let's talk architecture.

Why do we talk about fan noise so much? FAQ Friday #46

Trust good ol' 31na22fxs6fszqooqlgpqydistfu to come to our defense in the face of burgerking's predictable slander...

at oxide we have, straight up, the best openapi generation and management tooling in the world

Learning about @oxide.computer's Hubris RTOS has been an incredible exercise in how different systems can be. In some sense, it has essentially made the polar opposite choice to everything I've done with embassy, async, and ergot over the past 3-5 years. Neither are *wrong*, they're just different.

Today, Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel from the @oaklandballers.bsky.social return to Oxide and Friends, joining @ahl.bsky.social, @sdtuck.bsky.social and me to reveal some exciting collaborations with @oxide.computer! Join us, 5p Pacific today: discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

CI/CD is so much better on ephemeral @oxide.computer instances.

We’re ramping up manufacturing at @oxide.computer; part of that is efficiently validating the cabled backplane and network switches. On Monday @bcantrill.bsky.social and I spoke with colleagues about “Reverso”—a huge boon to manufacturing… with one bizarre bug to fix first

@oxide.computer CLI keyring

Yeah I got it running (not well) on an old laptop with some tweaks. It definitely needed more resources but it did mostly work. @matthewsanabria.com later posted his guide, which is probably a good place to start if you want to take stab at it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwXt...

I've been in California for six whole hours and I've already been roped into doing a podcast

Today on Oxide and Friends, @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by our colleagues to tell the tale of Reverso, an interesting (and deceptively simple!) piece of hardware that has proved essential to scaling manufacturing. Join us today, 5p Pacific! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

Brogrammer Garry Tan has been boasting about "writing" tens of thousands of lines of code each day as the paragon of productivity. Last week, @bcantrill.bsky.social and I were joined by @gregore.in to take a closer look at what Tan was generating. Is this really the right way to build system?

Last week, @bcantrill.bsky.social and I were joined by members of the Oxide mechanical engineering team to talk the mechanical challenges of building a rack-scale computer, and--in particular--of scaling manufacturing from just a few racks to hundreds.