Does Oxide oversubscribe resources?
No, we don’t. But the answer has some nuance that I want to break down. On the CPU side, Oxide makes use of AMD’s SMT or simultaneous multithreading, which treats each physical CPU core as two logical CPU cores. And those logical CPU cores are mapped virtual CPUs in your instances. On the RAM and disk side, those are just bytes all the way down. So your instances are free to use however much RAM and disk they need, should it be available in Oxide.
This approach helps prevent resource exhaustion. You can configure silo resource quotas to limit the amount of CPU, RAM, and disk available for use in your silo. The CPU and RAM for running instances count against a quota and the disk for running or stopped instances also count against a quota.
This helps mitigate the noisy neighbor problem, where one instance uses resources that another instance needs. In fact, you cannot start an instance that would otherwise exceed quotas.
It’s also important to note that workloads that are running well aren’t negatively impacted as additional workloads are provisioned. We sometimes talk about this as "sunny day performance". By not oversubscribing resources, we try to make rainy day and sunny day performance as similar as possible. This predictable performance was a major motivation for disallowing oversubscription.
This also helps with capacity planning. In Oxide the resource usage isn’t lying to you. What you’re actually using is what you’re actually using. And if you need to change the number of resources you’re using for an instance, you can do that. You can resize an instance without worrying about jumping up to some new resource size that costs more because you own the Oxide Cloud Computer. This enables teams to have honest conversations around capacity planning with data from Oxide to back it up.
Oxide is hardware and software built from the ground up, and we could choose to allow oversubscription of resources in the future should there be a customer need or use case for it, but not oversubscribing resources allows us to limit complexity and focus on building a great product for you.
If you’ve experienced resource exhaustion, capacity planning woes, or just had to balance cloud infrastructure provisioning with controlling costs, then Oxide is right for you. Oxide solves all of these problems and more and allows you to rightly provision your workloads on Oxide today. Head over to our website to learn more.