The trouble with testing and developing for rack-scale hardware is that rack-scale is not all that easy to come by. I mean, nevermind the whole DDR5-as-a-currency thing; even if all the parts were available in abundance, any completed racks go swiftly to the front lines (AKA our customers' data centers).
And the cherry on top: we need to do that without cutting special "test version" releases. Because we want to keep our CI sleek, but also because that wouldn’t be playing fair.
Now, don’t get me wrong — we’re not without our tricks. When I joined Oxide last year, one of the first things I was introduced to was our racklettes; that is, smaller than average racks of four sleds and two switches each. These racklettes can be initialized and run just like a real rack, precisely because they are a real rack. Just not in any form factor it would be economical to sell. But for testing they work like a charm. We have four of them today, soon to be eight, where we can test any combination of hardware/software requirement.
