From Sun to Oxide (Changelog Interviews #592)

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Bryan Cantrill, Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, joins Adam to share his journey from Sun to Oxide – from Sun and Fishworks, to DTrace, to ZFS, to Joyent and Node.js, and now working to build on-prem cloud servers as they should be at Oxide.

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 90,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
• Tailscale – Adam loves Tailscale! Tailscale is programmable networking software that’s private and secure by default. It’s the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other, wherever they are. Secure, remote access to production, databases, servers, kubernetes, and more. Try Tailscale for free for up to 100 devices and 3 users at changelog.com/tailscale, no credit card required. Also check out Remotely access Home Assistant via Tailscale for free!
• Neon – The fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. We separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Bryan Cantrill – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Shouting in the Datacenter
• Efficiency you can hear
• Joyent
• Changelog Interviews #475: Making the ZFS file system with Matt Ahrens, co-founder of the ZFS project
• Oxide
• Oxide Principles
• Oxideo Docs: Hypervisor and Storage
• Changelog Interviews #155: The Future of Node.js with Scott Hammond
• TJ Holowaychuk’s Farewell Node.js

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Bab

1. Welcome to The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Sentry (00:01:19)

https://sentry.io/

3. Start the show! (00:04:33)

4. Are you popular? (00:05:31)

5. Screaming into the server (00:07:17)

6. Latency from vibration (00:14:31)

7. Sun the beginning (00:20:17)

8. The creation of ZFS (00:35:01)

9. ZFS in Crucible (Oxide's storage service) (00:37:30)

10. Oracle's acquisition of Sun (00:41:51)

11. IPO not acquired (by Oracle) (00:46:26)

12. Sponsor: Tailscale (00:48:46)

https://changelog.com/tailscale

13. Node.js, io.js & Joyent (00:51:48)

14. The literal begining of Oxide (01:05:36)

15. Living the "Silicon Valley" way (01:25:19)

16. Oracle's motivation to acquire Sun (01:27:27)

17. Sponsor: Neon (01:35:48)

https://neon.tech

18. Who's on-prem friendly? (01:37:49)

19. The gravity of Oxide (01:42:33)

20. Are you contrarian by nature? (01:45:05)

21. Do you have product market fit? (01:48:53)

22. The effects of your success (01:50:39)

23. Total addressable market of Oxide (01:55:24)

24. Servicing at scale (01:58:08)

25. Do you need to raise again? (02:05:13)

26. What season of Silicon Valley are you in? (02:07:36)

27. Did you tell them no? (02:12:00)

28. What is the best fit for Oxide (right now)? (02:13:33)

29. Who can we help connect you with? (02:15:27)

30. Oxide makes their own hardware (02:22:37)

31. Adam is impressed (02:23:49)

32. Let's talk Silicon Valley (02:24:55)

33. That was epic! BTW...we're at Build 2024. (02:29:34)