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stevehipwell 5 hours ago [-]
I'm interested to see how the `oxide-cloud-controller-manager` is being built for "modern" Kubernetes and if it leads to any signify difference compared to CCMs that originated in-tree. Given the way Oxide engineer their solutions this could be really interesting.
FYI I've got `karpenter-provider-oxide` on my bingo card...
sudomateo 4 hours ago [-]
There are few paths we can take here. The CCM's primary responsibility is to implement the cloudprovider.Interface[0] which has node, route, and service controllers. However, the CCM can run arbitrary named controllers as well, giving us a fun extension point for the future. The in-tree CCMs are being phased out in favor of out-of-tree CCMs. The AWS Cloud Provider[1] is a good example of what that's starting to look like.
My colleague demo'd Karpeneter internally. We haven't committed releasing it yet but we're discussing it.
My point was that the major cloud CCMs are rooted (at least spiritually) in in-tree implementations. With Oxide having an API first strategy (similar in principle to a major cloud provider) the direction you take on your greenfield CCM could be interesting.
RE Karpenter, it always seemed like a natural fit for Oxide, even more so than some of the currently implementors. And now you have the expertise in the team, I'd be really interested in the reason if you don't go down that path.
bmwagner10 4 hours ago [-]
Karpenter is definitely a natural fit for Oxide. There's some interesting boundaries that we're discussing internally, like @sudomateo mentioned. One of which is CAPI. There's a CAPI Karpenter provider that elmiko built (notably back in the very early days of Karpenter). I think there's room for both use-cases. Some may want to use CAPI for everything and others may want a platform that is based on CAPI but guest clusters are not.
One implementation specific detail which makes Karpenter interesting on Oxide is the tunable CPU and memory parameters rather than strict instance type shapes. The prototype I built for Karpenter on Oxide generates all possible "instance type" combinations, so you can create some really specific nodes to bin-pack pods.
Another interesting area is multiple providers. This is becoming pretty common across public clouds too. A multi-provider Karpenter is something I'm interested in and I know some folks have already been gluing together, but the Karpenter story isn't great on maintaining those since you basically need to compile them together today. CAPIs multi-provider story is a bit cleaner since it only relies on CRDs.
If you have ideas, let's chat in the Kubernetes slack #karpenter-dev.
sudomateo 4 hours ago [-]
Totally, the out-of-tree CCM gives us a good opportunity to differentiate.
Autoscaling is a requested feature, and Karpenter fits that shape naturally. The nuance is to decide where something like the Cluster API provider ends and Karpenter begins since there's a bit of overlap in concerns. Specifically, both want to manage Kubernetes nodes but for different reasons. We're discussing it though. We have a Kubernetes watercooler meeting today where we'll likely discuss the comments in this post!
thegagne 5 hours ago [-]
Yes this would be great addition! Also it would be awesome to see proper load balancer, ingress controller with `gateway api` and a `api gateway` (two separate things).
I’m not an oxide customer, just a fan. I have lots of ideas around how something like this should look, being disappointed with the complexity and also shortcomings of products on the market for this stuff, both in the cloud and on prem.
sudomateo 4 hours ago [-]
I'll need to record a video on what's possible today. My personal Kubernetes cluster running on Oxide uses the CCM for LoadBalancer services and NGINX Gateway Fabric for Gateway API things. I'm mostly using HTTPRoute resources today.
There's an opportunity to more tightly integrate at the network layer but we'll want to get our load balancer released first.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
> My personal Kubernetes cluster running on Oxide
What a flex.
It's gotten to the point I'm starting to actively look for Oxide customers so I can apply with them.
preisschild 6 minutes ago [-]
I think it'd be cooler if you could just run kubernetes directly on their bare metal hardware without their hypervisor in between
pianoben 5 hours ago [-]
I have seldom wanted anything as much as I want an Oxide rack at home. Maybe in 40 years we'll start to see the first ones show up in surplus auctions...
sudomateo 3 hours ago [-]
You can run the control plane at home. I have a video on how to do it. Until we make a smaller footprint that's the only way you'd get Oxide at home.
Every single Oxide article has comments about people wanting one at home.
A great example of completely misdirected marketing and/or engineering. Oxide should have developed home microcomputers, and they would have sold like cupcakes, with their ASCII art marketing. Instead they do million dollar "mainframes" that no one (except VCs) wants to buy.
bcantrill 2 hours ago [-]
(I think you meant "like hotcakes", not "like cupcakes"?)
In any event: from the beginning, we have always been targeted at the enterprise buyer who is looking at annual public cloud bills in the tens, hundreds or (in some cases) thousands of millions of dollars per year. We love the enthusiasm that Oxide engenders among the home lab set, but that's not how we have geared the business (for lots of good reasons).
Also, for whatever it's worth: people do want to buy them, it turns out.
nickpeterson 54 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
orf 2 hours ago [-]
This comment is a great example of completely misunderstanding… everything?
Just because a few people on a niche tech site are excited by niche tech stuff doesn’t mean you should focus your entire business on them, and the implication that you’d be successful in marketing a consumer product with ASCII art is mind blowing.
quadrifoliate 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they have done plenty of market research, and that research probably indicates that enthusiasts who buy server racks are a much smaller market than large enterprise users that need easily scalable on-prem resources.
Lots of people saying "I would love this" is not a profitable market. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in that phrase. Would you buy the lowest level rack for $100k, paying extra for any support? (I don't have any insight into actual pricing, but I know enterprise consumers don't bat an eyelid at prices like that.)
If not then maybe the "I would love this" is not relevant for a real market.
asa400 35 minutes ago [-]
Homelab tinkerers are essentially a non-market. They barely want to pay for the cheapest commodity hardware. Tens of individuals would buy Oxide racks or theoretical microcomputers with their own money.
sunshowers 2 hours ago [-]
Lots of people want to buy our stuff!
bakies 4 hours ago [-]
fwiw, I am very satisfied with talos and k8s at home.
overflowy 5 hours ago [-]
I would absolutely kill for them to open source their documentation system.
bcantrill 5 hours ago [-]
Are you referring to our RFD system?[0][1] Because if so, good news![2]
They might still be available for killing someone out of gratitude
lars_francke 3 hours ago [-]
Disclaimer: I'm totally biased here.
I talked with a colleague from Oxide in 2024 about your Kubernetes story and he said back then "not yet but soon-ish". Seems like soon-ish is now :)
We said we'd talk again when that happens but he's since left Oxide. If you (or well...your customers) are interested in a Kubernetes native data platform 100% open source we'd be very happy to talk about how that could work easily. As it's "just" Kubernetes it should be trivial but we'd be happy to test and add you to our list: https://docs.stackable.tech/home/stable/kubernetes/#supporte...
The offer stands. If you're interested, my mail is in my HN profile. https://stackable.tech
bitlad 4 hours ago [-]
I am wondering when would you use kubernetes on oxide vs running kubernetes with kubevirt on baremetal?
At first look, it feels like oxide is equivalent to proxmox or some virtualization tool, may be it uses qemu stuff underneath.
Just curious.
The reason I am asking this is that, we have lot onprem scenarios in our business. We are tightly coupled with k8s, to solve this we started building an internal project that is kubernetes API compatible [1] but runs containerd or WASM or our platform natively.
Good question. We use our own hypervisor[0] that's not KVM/QEMU. We don't have nested virtualization today so we don't follow the KubeVirt model, though we are discussing what CRDs like OxideInstance would look like for those that want to operate solely in Kubernetes manifests.
The core primitive on Oxide is the instance (virtual machine). We could support some container primitive, but that's a larger product direction discussion. Our host OS is Helios (Illumos) so there are details to iron out there regarding what abstractions we would build and expose to the users. Not impossible but not something we're currently pursuing either given that we have other immediate product asks.
If you're at a scale where compute density, power efficiency, security, and rack-level API management matters then that's where Oxide makes sense for you.
You would use Oxide if you hate Dell/HPE/Lenovo/Supermicro. Also most people won't run k8s on bare metal because they want to dynamically provision a bunch of clusters.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
You treat the hardware as a software problem and provision it dynamically. Also keeps I/O high if you have data locality (HCI).
bakies 2 hours ago [-]
you can do that on k8s
p_l 2 hours ago [-]
Oxide is shipping the baremetal server as well, with integrated hypervisor - so running kubernetes with kubevirt on it makes less sense than integrating with the host hypervisor
bakies 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah me too. Like I kinda compare oxide to coreweave and coreweave is built on top of k8s afaik. I'm wondering what the underlying tech oxide leans on. If I was doing this I would be using talos and k8s on baremetal and building on top of that. Container first rather than VM first seems like a big advantage imo. Most workloads will be containers.
bitlad 3 hours ago [-]
Coreweave is a cloud provider right? I dont think it is apple to apple comparison.
bakies 2 hours ago [-]
What's a cloud? K8s is a cloud imo, so is what oxide is providing afaict
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
Most security minded orgs and also AWS deploy containers in VMs for better security
oxide and coreweave?
Oxide is in-house custom everything. Switches. Racks. Power bus. BMC. Firmware. OS. Software and APIs. Virtualization. Etc.
e12e 4 hours ago [-]
When oxide provide your metal?
moondev 4 hours ago [-]
Love to see the CAPOx provider and buy in to Cluster API
preisschild 6 minutes ago [-]
Yeah me too, unfortunately I cant justify huge 100K USD servers so ill continue with cluster api provider hetzner and metal3. The whole CAPI ecosystem is quite cool.
donatj 2 hours ago [-]
Bug report I guess, but the pages top navigation seems completely inoperable to me on my iPad. Clicking with my finger does not work. Clicking with my Apple Pencil does not work. Any sort of hover state that might be there does not work (with the pencil)
sudomateo 2 hours ago [-]
Reported internally. Thank you!
whazor 4 hours ago [-]
Kubernetes is where Oxide, from my armchair, doesn't yet quite match the public cloud.
On AWS EKS Fargate, each pod runs in its own dedicated VM. With Oxide each k8s node is a VM, so you still need something like Talos.
On networking it looks like it is getting closer. Where you can have external subnet give pod routed IPs without overlay. But the gap, as marked by the article, is also the load balancing.
It would be nice if Kubernetes were a native feature out-of-the-box. Also integrated within the existing user/access control.
sudomateo 4 hours ago [-]
We're discussing what "native Kubernetes" looks like on Oxide in the limit. There's a bunch to build, some of which is blocked on product gaps. We'll get there though!
I don't necessarily want to match the public cloud experience if there's an opportunity for Oxide to exceed the public cloud experience. Eliminating the overlay is a good example of this. We have customers using external subnets to eliminate the overlay but we haven't integrated that into our controllers yet.
wolttam 4 hours ago [-]
So you’d be attaching a new volume to the running worker VM for each PVC? This seems a little odd to me. Could you attach a single large volume, and do path-based provisioning on that?
sudomateo 4 hours ago [-]
> So you’d be attaching a new volume to the running worker VM for each PVC?
That's what we prototyped before local disk was released and before we started disk hot-plug work.
> Could you attach a single large volume, and do path-based provisioning on that?
Possibly. We'd still want disk hot-plug first. Otherwise, customers would have to create their cluster in a certain shape before using PVCs.
itintheory 4 hours ago [-]
Does seem like that could be an issue for RWX PVCs, unless those volumes can be mounted to multiple nodes. Depending on the workload, you might be better off using NFS.
wsng 4 hours ago [-]
There is no one-size-fits-all, but I would say NFS is nowadays not a preferred option for most modern distributed datastores. They are fine with local storage only, and achieve coordination with higher-level protocols. Running them on top of NFS kills their performance.
redwood 4 hours ago [-]
How are folks managing stateful workloads like databases on Oxide?
sudomateo 3 hours ago [-]
I cover this a bit in the post. Today they are running something like Longhorn backed by Oxide storage. When we release our CSI plugin they can use that instead.
dilyevsky 2 hours ago [-]
why longhorn and not mayastor? longhorn doesn't even have nvmeof that is not experimental
sudomateo 2 hours ago [-]
Could be whichever. Customers have expressed a desired for Longhorn given they were already using it so we started our testing there. Ultimately our CSI plugin will be the official Oxide path.
kirici 1 hours ago [-]
Why Mayastor and not (Rook-)Ceph?
dilyevsky 45 minutes ago [-]
Slow, buggy and resource hungry. Faster spdk-based engine rewrite has been on the way for like 7 years now
preisschild 3 minutes ago [-]
One cool feature of ceph is reed solomon erasure coding, myastor only does replication if storage efficiency is important
FYI I've got `karpenter-provider-oxide` on my bingo card...
My colleague demo'd Karpeneter internally. We haven't committed releasing it yet but we're discussing it.
[0] https://github.com/kubernetes/cloud-provider/blob/master/clo...
[1] https://github.com/kubernetes/cloud-provider-aws
RE Karpenter, it always seemed like a natural fit for Oxide, even more so than some of the currently implementors. And now you have the expertise in the team, I'd be really interested in the reason if you don't go down that path.
One implementation specific detail which makes Karpenter interesting on Oxide is the tunable CPU and memory parameters rather than strict instance type shapes. The prototype I built for Karpenter on Oxide generates all possible "instance type" combinations, so you can create some really specific nodes to bin-pack pods.
Another interesting area is multiple providers. This is becoming pretty common across public clouds too. A multi-provider Karpenter is something I'm interested in and I know some folks have already been gluing together, but the Karpenter story isn't great on maintaining those since you basically need to compile them together today. CAPIs multi-provider story is a bit cleaner since it only relies on CRDs.
If you have ideas, let's chat in the Kubernetes slack #karpenter-dev.
Autoscaling is a requested feature, and Karpenter fits that shape naturally. The nuance is to decide where something like the Cluster API provider ends and Karpenter begins since there's a bit of overlap in concerns. Specifically, both want to manage Kubernetes nodes but for different reasons. We're discussing it though. We have a Kubernetes watercooler meeting today where we'll likely discuss the comments in this post!
I’m not an oxide customer, just a fan. I have lots of ideas around how something like this should look, being disappointed with the complexity and also shortcomings of products on the market for this stuff, both in the cloud and on prem.
There's an opportunity to more tightly integrate at the network layer but we'll want to get our load balancer released first.
What a flex.
It's gotten to the point I'm starting to actively look for Oxide customers so I can apply with them.
A great example of completely misdirected marketing and/or engineering. Oxide should have developed home microcomputers, and they would have sold like cupcakes, with their ASCII art marketing. Instead they do million dollar "mainframes" that no one (except VCs) wants to buy.
In any event: from the beginning, we have always been targeted at the enterprise buyer who is looking at annual public cloud bills in the tens, hundreds or (in some cases) thousands of millions of dollars per year. We love the enthusiasm that Oxide engenders among the home lab set, but that's not how we have geared the business (for lots of good reasons).
Also, for whatever it's worth: people do want to buy them, it turns out.
Just because a few people on a niche tech site are excited by niche tech stuff doesn’t mean you should focus your entire business on them, and the implication that you’d be successful in marketing a consumer product with ASCII art is mind blowing.
Lots of people saying "I would love this" is not a profitable market. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in that phrase. Would you buy the lowest level rack for $100k, paying extra for any support? (I don't have any insight into actual pricing, but I know enterprise consumers don't bat an eyelid at prices like that.)
If not then maybe the "I would love this" is not relevant for a real market.
[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba...
[2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site
I talked with a colleague from Oxide in 2024 about your Kubernetes story and he said back then "not yet but soon-ish". Seems like soon-ish is now :)
We said we'd talk again when that happens but he's since left Oxide. If you (or well...your customers) are interested in a Kubernetes native data platform 100% open source we'd be very happy to talk about how that could work easily. As it's "just" Kubernetes it should be trivial but we'd be happy to test and add you to our list: https://docs.stackable.tech/home/stable/kubernetes/#supporte...
The offer stands. If you're interested, my mail is in my HN profile. https://stackable.tech
At first look, it feels like oxide is equivalent to proxmox or some virtualization tool, may be it uses qemu stuff underneath.
Just curious.
The reason I am asking this is that, we have lot onprem scenarios in our business. We are tightly coupled with k8s, to solve this we started building an internal project that is kubernetes API compatible [1] but runs containerd or WASM or our platform natively.
Just curious how oxides work in this scenario
[1] https://github.com/debarshibasak/superkube
The core primitive on Oxide is the instance (virtual machine). We could support some container primitive, but that's a larger product direction discussion. Our host OS is Helios (Illumos) so there are details to iron out there regarding what abstractions we would build and expose to the users. Not impossible but not something we're currently pursuing either given that we have other immediate product asks.
If you're at a scale where compute density, power efficiency, security, and rack-level API management matters then that's where Oxide makes sense for you.
[0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis
oxide and coreweave?
Oxide is in-house custom everything. Switches. Racks. Power bus. BMC. Firmware. OS. Software and APIs. Virtualization. Etc.
On AWS EKS Fargate, each pod runs in its own dedicated VM. With Oxide each k8s node is a VM, so you still need something like Talos.
On networking it looks like it is getting closer. Where you can have external subnet give pod routed IPs without overlay. But the gap, as marked by the article, is also the load balancing.
It would be nice if Kubernetes were a native feature out-of-the-box. Also integrated within the existing user/access control.
I don't necessarily want to match the public cloud experience if there's an opportunity for Oxide to exceed the public cloud experience. Eliminating the overlay is a good example of this. We have customers using external subnets to eliminate the overlay but we haven't integrated that into our controllers yet.
That's what we prototyped before local disk was released and before we started disk hot-plug work.
> Could you attach a single large volume, and do path-based provisioning on that?
Possibly. We'd still want disk hot-plug first. Otherwise, customers would have to create their cluster in a certain shape before using PVCs.