Welcome back to our FAQ Friday, where we answer your frequently asked questions about Oxide. Let’s get right into the question here:
Is Oxide designed for virtual machine workloads, container workloads, or both?
The short answer is both really. Virtual machines or instances are the core unit of compute on Oxide. If you have a workload that’s meant to run on a virtual machine, you can customize virtual machines in a few different ways to enable that workload:
You can use user data or cloud-init to customize a virtual machine as it starts up
You can build a custom virtual machine image with your application and its dependencies pre-installed
You can also use your existing configuration management tooling to provision an instance and configure it to your needs
But what about container workloads? Well, virtual machines are the perfect base for running container workloads. You can use user data, build an image, or use configuration management tooling to install a container runtime on your virtual machine to enable your Docker, or your Podman, or your Kubernetes workloads.
Speaking of Kubernetes, Oxide supports popular Kubernetes technologies from SUSE Rancher to Red Hat OpenShift to Talos Linux, and we don’t stop there. We’ve created some integrations for you to use with Kubernetes. Such as our Rancher node driver, our upcoming Kubernetes cloud controller manager, and cluster API.
For more details on those see RFD 493.
We know that most enterprises are running a mixture of virtual machine workloads and container workloads, and Oxide supports both of them today with each release bringing more features to further enable those workloads. Now, every enterprise has its own different use cases, but here are some of the common use cases that we find customers are using Oxide for with success.
They’re running production applications on top of Kubernetes on top of Oxide, or even just directly on virtual machines on Oxide. They’re spinning up ephemeral environments for dev, test, and staging. They’re also running CI/CD runners to shorten their builds and lower their costs.
I am sure at least one of these use cases resonated with you. You’re probably sitting there saying, "Hey Matt, I want Oxide for my workloads. What can I do?" Well, you can explore how Oxide can enable your virtual machine and container workloads by reading our SDK documentation and other documentation to understand how Oxide approaches infrastructure automation.
You can also contact us and connect with someone at Oxide to help map out your deployment, your migration. We’d love to hear what use cases you have, and I know I personally would love to hear what use cases you have, especially for your Kubernetes workloads. Let us know, reach out!