Hey, it’s Bryan from Oxide. I’m back with our FAQ Friday, and one of the questions we get, especially for those that need to run in a secure facility on-prem, is:
Can Oxide run in an air-gapped environment?
And you know exactly where this question is coming from. Lots of people target that on-prem use case, and then they want to have something that calls back to some cloud controller somewhere or something that’s off-prem.
And in a secure facility, you obviously can’t do that. But even in an unsecured facility, you still don’t want to do that because the next thing you know, there’s a public cloud outage that is affecting your on-prem liveness. That’s no good. So when we designed the Oxide rack, we designed it to operate across that air gap.
It’s a hard problem because we’re shipping a distributed system with this thing. That means we need to ship that distributed system and be able to update it across an air gap. Be able to allow that bundle to be walked across an air gap and installed by a technician. It’s a big engineering challenge, one we’ve taken on and succeeded with.
We also need to be able to support it across an air gap. How do you do that? Well, you need to make sure that if this thing is misbehaving, you’ve got a way for an operator to go in and create what we call a support bundle. To be able to audit that support bundle to know exactly what is in this thing that I’m about to give to Oxide, and then hand that to us and our unbelievable support team can take that apart and try to understand what’s going on with your Oxide rack.
It is indisputably a harder problem to operate over an air gap, but it is essential and very core to why we started Oxide in the first place. Thanks, and see you next time.