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Why Oxide Chose Illumos
Servers in the Oxide Rack will form the backbone of both the compute and storage services available to customers. The rack will be composed of a variety of hardware and software components, some of which represent resource-constrained or inflexible environments; e.g., the Service Processor (SP) or Hardware Root Of Trust (ROT).
In contrast, the server CPU is a cornucopia: software update delivery is easy when compared to device firmware; rich postmortem debugging and live tracing or instrumentation facilities are feasible; the full power of modern programming platforms like Rust is available. Virtual machines are the most prominent customer-visible resource that the Oxide Rack will provide, but there are a number of critical internal software components that will form the basis for delivery of that service; e.g., highly available distributed block storage ([rfd29]), the user facing API ([rfd4],[rfd21]), and the control plane as a whole ([rfd48]). With a relatively small team and a product that will form a critical infrastructure layer, it is important to focus on selecting and building tools that act as force multipliers for us; that allow us to find and correct software defects completely and promptly from as few observed incidents as possible.
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