Oxide Computer Company Console Demo and VM Provisioning

Travis demonstrates the Oxide console and deploys multiple virtual machines (utilizing Terraform). He covers silos, images, projects, and instances as well.

Travis Haymore from Oxide Computer Company presented a detailed demonstration of their console and virtual machine (VM) provisioning capabilities during Cloud Field Day 20. He began by providing an overview of their co-location environment, specifically highlighting a rack deployed in the CoreSite data center in Milpitas. This rack serves multiple purposes, including internal use, customer demos, and evaluations. Haymore introduced the concept of “silos” as a means of achieving multi-tenancy, where resources such as CPU, memory, and storage are logically and cryptographically separated. Each silo has a distinct API endpoint, ensuring a clear demarcation between different users or customers.

In his demo, Haymore showcased the process of creating and managing projects within a silo. Projects act as logical containers for different efforts within an organization, allowing for varied configurations and user privileges. He demonstrated how to create a new project, manage instances, disks, snapshots, and images, and configure virtual private clouds (VPCs) and floating IPs. Using the UI, he provisioned a VM by selecting the necessary resources and an operating system image, in this case, Ubuntu. He emphasized the ease of passing SSH keys via Cloud-Init for immediate access to the instances, which is particularly useful for teams needing quick and secure access.

Haymore also touched on more advanced configurations, such as attaching external storage and managing network interfaces. He highlighted the flexibility of the system, noting that while many customers prefer using the API, CLI, or Terraform provider for automation, the UI remains a useful tool for less sophisticated users. The demo concluded with an example of using Terraform to automate the provisioning of multiple instances, demonstrating the system’s responsiveness and ease of use. Haymore also discussed the future potential for expanding storage and memory within the rack, and the possibility of integrating different hardware profiles to meet specific needs, emphasizing Oxide’s commitment to flexibility and scalability in their cloud computing solutions.