SE Radio 709: Bryan Cantrill on the Data Center Control Plane
From Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers by SE-Radio Team
February 26, 2026 · 1h 5m · Episode 709
About this episode
Bryan Cantrill discusses the challenges of deploying hardware at scale and the importance of control planes in data centers.
Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about challenges in deploying hardware on-premises at scale. They discuss the difficulty of building up Samsung data centers with off-the-shelf hardware, how vendors silently replace components that cause performance problems, and why AWS and Google build their own hardware. Bryan describes the security vulnerabilities and poor practices built into many baseboard management controllers, the purpose of a control plane, and his experiences building one in NodeJS while struggling with the runtime's future during his time at Joyent. He explains why Oxide chose to use Rust for its control plane and the OpenSolaris-based Illumos as the operating system for their vertically integrated rack-scale hardware, which is designed to help address a number of these key challenges. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
People in this episode
Host: Jeremy Jung
Guest: Bryan Cantrill
Topics covered
- data center
- hardware deployment
- control plane
- security vulnerabilities
- rack-scale hardware
- software engineering
Keywords
- data center control plane
- hardware deployment
- performance problems
- baseboard management controllers
- Rust
- NodeJS
- rack-scale hardware
Sponsors
IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Software magazine
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Oxide Computer company, Samsung, AWS, Google, Joyent, OpenSolaris, Illumos
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