The history of servers, the cloud, and what’s next – with Oxide
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How have servers and the cloud evolved in the last 30 years, and what might be next? Bryan Cantrill was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems during both the Dotcom Boom and the Dotcom Bust. Today, he is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer, where he works on modern server infrastructure.
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, Bryan joins me to break down how modern computing infrastructure evolved. We discuss why the Dotcom Bust produced deeper innovation than the Boom, how constraints shape better systems, and what the rise of the cloud changed and did not change about building reliable infrastructure.
Our conversation covers early web infrastructure at Sun, the emergence of AWS, Kubernetes and cloud neutrality, and the tradeoffs between renting cloud space and building your own. We also touch on the complexity of server-side software updates, experimenting with AI, the limits of large language models, and how engineering organizations scale without losing their values.
If you want a systems-level perspective on computing that connects past cycles to today’s engineering decisions, this episode offers a rare long-range view.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(01:26) Computer science in the 1990s
(03:01) Sun and Cisco’s web dominance
(05:41) The Dotcom Boom
(10:26) From Boom to Bust
(15:32) The innovations of the Bust
(17:50) The open source shift
(22:00) Oracle moves into Sun’s orbit
(24:54) AWS dominance (2010–2014)
(28:15) How Kubernetes and cloud neutrality
(30:58) Custom infrastructure
(36:10) Renting the cloud vs. buying hardware
(45:28) Designing a computer from first principles
(50:02) Why everyone is paid the same salary at Oxide
(54:14) Oxide’s software stack
(58:33) The evolution of software updates
(1:02:55) How Oxide uses AI
(1:06:05) The limitations of LLMs
(1:11:44) AI use and experimentation at Oxide
(1:17:45) Oxide’s diverse teams
(1:22:44) Remote work at Oxide
(1:24:11) Scaling company values
(1:27:36) AI’s impact on the future of engineering
(1:31:04) Bryan’s advice for junior engineers
(1:34:01) Book recommendations
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Startups on hard mode: Oxide. Part 1: Hardware
• Startups on hard mode: Oxide, Part 2: Software & Culture
• Three cloud providers, three outages: three different responses
• Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud
• Inside Agoda’s private Cloud
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Inside Oxide (Friends)
Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck, the co-founders of Oxide, are on the pod live (to tape) from the stage at OxCon. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide’s annual internal conference to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now. The best part was this on-stage discussion with Bryan and Steve. Enjoy!
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Bryan Cantrill – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
Steve Tuck – LinkedIn, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Oxide’s $100M Series B
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Voices of Oxide (Interview)
Voices of Oxide on the pod! Cliff Biffle (engineer), Dave Pacheco (engineer), and Ben Leonard (designer) are on the show today. Jerod and I were invited to Oxide’s annual internal conference called OxCon to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now.
Cliff Biffle is working on all Hubris and firmware. Cliff says “There’s a lot that happens before the ‘main CPU’ can even power on.” Dave Pacheco is leading the efforts on Oxide’s “Update” system. And Ben Leonard in charge of all things brand and design at Oxide.
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Start free at CodeRabbit.ai
Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Featuring:
Cliff Biffle – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn
Dave Pacheco – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn
Ben Leonard – LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
cliffle.com/blog
Hubris - A small open-source operating system for deeply-embedded computer systems
Update on Update
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Oxide is crossing the chasm (Friends)
Bryan Cantrill returns in the wake of Oxide Computer Company’s $100M Series B. Bryan tells us how he’s avoiding an appearance on Silicon Valley (ding), why their uniform compensation is working, where Oxide fits in the AI datacenter, what scaling to 50+ rack orders looks like, and more. (GitHub has no CEO and saving Intel)++
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Sponsors:
CodeRabbit – AI-native code reviews, built for the modern dev stack. — CodeRabbit is your always-on code reviewer—flagging hallucinations, surfacing smells, and enforcing standards, all without leaving your IDE or GitHub PRs. Trusted by top teams to ship better code, faster.
Start free at CodeRabbit.ai
Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Featuring:
Bryan Cantrill – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Our $100M Series B / Oxide
James Carville in The War Room
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
From Sun to Oxide (Interview)
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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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!
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Featuring:
Bryan Cantrill – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
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!
Building Computers for the Cloud with Steve Tuck
Steve Tuck, Co-Founder & CEO of Oxide Computer Company, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his work to make modern computers cloud-friendly. Steve describes what it was like going through early investment rounds, and the difficult but important decision he and his co-founder made to build their own switch. Corey and Steve discuss the demand for on-prem computers that are built for cloud capability, and Steve reveals how Oxide approaches their product builds to ensure the masses can adopt their technology wherever they are.
About Steve
Steve is the Co-founder & CEO of Oxide Computer Company. He previously was President & COO of Joyent, a cloud computing company acquired by Samsung. Before that, he spent 10 years at Dell in a number of different roles.
Links Referenced:
Oxide Computer Company: https://oxide.computer/
On The Metal Podcast: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/on-the-metal
Bringing the cloud on prem (Friends)
Adam was out when Bryan made his podcast debut here on The Changelog, so we had to get him back on the show along with his co-founder and CEO Steve Tuck to discuss Silicon Valley (the TV show), all things Oxide, homelab possibilities, bringing the power of the cloud on prem, and more.
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Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Featuring:
Bryan Cantrill – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
Steve Tuck – LinkedIn, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Crate tui
On the Metal with Jeff Rothschild
Oxide specs
The Changelog #496: Oxide builds servers (as they should be)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Oxide builds servers (as they should be) (Interview)
Today we have a special treat: Bryan Cantrill, co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer! You may know Bryan from his work on DTrace. He worked at Sun for many years, then Oracle, and finally Joyent before starting Oxide.
We dig deep into their company’s mission/principles/values, hear how it it all started with a VC’s blank check that turned out to be anything but, and learn how Oxide’s integrated approach to hardware & software sets them up to compete with the established players by building servers as they should be.
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FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.io
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Featuring:
Bryan Cantrill – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
Oxide Computer
Pierre Lamond
Brendan Gregg shouting in the datacenter
On Hubris and Humility: developing an OS for robustness in Rust
Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
Omicron: Oxide control plane
Oxide on Twitter
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Hyperscaler Infrastructure for the Masses with Jessie Frazelle, Steve Tuck, and Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computing
Links Referenced
Oxide Website
On The Metal Podcast
Episode 56: Bringing Open Source to the Cloud
About Jess Frazelle
Jessie Frazelle is a computer programmer who has worked at GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Docker and various companies, startups, even design agencies before that. She’s worked on a lot of the open source projects in the container ecosystem, she’s a top abuser of the GitHub api, and runs her own cloud from her apartment and a colo in NYC called jess cloud.
Links Referenced:
twitter.com/jessfraz
github.com
microsoft.com
google.com
docker.com
contained.af
cncf.io
summerofcode.withgoogle.com
Joe.dev
Soul of a New Machine
github.com/Gazler/githug
S7:E3 - Can you do open source full-time? (Jessie Frazelle, Bryan Liles)
What does open source look like when you do it at a big company? Is it even possible to work on open source full-time? In this special episode, we talk to Jessie Frazelle and Bryan Liles about their experiences and perspectives on open source. We also feature our third episode of Tales from the Command Line, which is all about going from a really small startup to coding at a huge company.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Ruby on Rails
Jenn Schiffer
Node
Kubernetes
Go
Ruby Together
Learn OpenShift (Scott's open source project)
Docker
Katacoda
Linux
CAP Theorem
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Jessie Frazelle
Jess Frazelle works at GitHub on open source and community. She has been a maintainer of Docker, contributor to RunC, Kubernetes, and Golang, as well as other projects.
Bryan Liles
Bryan is a developer, open source contributor, and international speaker.
Jessie Frazelle on Maintaining Open Source, Docker, dotfiles
Jessie Frazelle joins us this week to talk about being an open source maintainer, Docker’s pull request acceptance workflow, dotfiles, getting started with public speaking.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Pick a Plan. Pick a Distro. Pick a Location. Start your server and use gotime20 to get $20 in credit.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform.
Equinox – Build, package and distribute self-updating Go apps to your customers. It’s perfect for CLI tools and on-premise Go software.
Featuring:
Jessie Frazelle – GitHub, X
Erik St. Martin – GitHub, X
Carlisia Thompson – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Brian Ketelsen – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Maintainerati: WONTFIX Cabal
The Art of Closing
Jessie’s dotfiles
GothamGo
Interesting Go Projects and News
GoBridge Talk Formula
GoKit: A toolkit for microservices
Francesc Campoy: Analyzing Go code with BigQuery (blog post)
The complete guide to Go net/http timeouts (blog post)
A pipeline-based CI system written in Go
etcd3
Changelog Weekly
Changelog Nightly
Free Software Friday
Brian - jq: command line json tool
Carlisia - Go testing in the browser: goconvey
Jessie - A simple utility to safely retrieve arbitrary files and Michael Crosby’s world best gists
Erik - Ranger: console file manager with VI key bindings
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
