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ClusterHQ is shutting down

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Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#41

Post by jtroyer »

chrissnell wrote: post #15

We've been running Kubernetes (500+ containers) in production for over a year now. I believe (and hope) that 2017 will be the year that persistent data storage will be solved. We are ready to move our data out of OpenStack and have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure. But, we're not there yet. The options just aren't good enough. L…

Along with Docker's efforts, there are others working on container-based storage. This landscape[1] lists Ceph, Gluster, but also Portworx, Minio, Diamanti, Dell EMC's Rex-Ray, and SolidFire. I think also folks like StorageOS and Supergiant and frankly the whole storage & platform industry players are running in this direction. [1] https://github.com/cncf/landscape

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#42

Post by jimjag »

ferrantim wrote: post #23
jat850 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting, Michael, and I hope good things for you in the future. Do you foresee Flocker living on in opensource form?

Yes, Flocker will remain open-source and my hope is that the community continues to improve it. Fli too, btw, for creating and managing ZFS snapshots https://github.com/ClusterHQ/fli

Maybe donation of the code to an FOSS foundation, like maybe Apache, might be a way of ensuring the community continues. Or, at least, gives it the fighting chance to do so...

DM me if curious

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#43

Post by BinaryIdiot »

Nacraile wrote: post #31
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #8

How many people were employed at ClusterHQ? Honestly I never even heard of the company but I had heard of some of the open source projects. Maybe I'm just out of the loop. Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious. > I’…

> Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it? You're beating on a straw man. Nobody (very few people?) thinks the failure itself is good in and of itself. The mentality is to observe that even if a business endeavour ends in financial failure, that outcome is just one effect of a long process that had many effects, and that many of the other effects of the process were highly beneficial. Sure, some…

> You're beating on a straw man.

How so? If you're stating that you're going to greatly enjoy your failure, how is that not making failure seem good? Can you greatly enjoy something that you don't consider awesome (greatly being the keyword)?

Seems like we could split hairs over this in a variety of different ways. On the other hand the rest of your post discusses the value created out of a failed company which wasn't related to the context of my post.

I think we're going to be arguing in straw man circles :)

> if they distributed their risk over many bets, they are probably going to come out ahead of where they would be if they made no bets whatsoever

Not necessarily true, actually. The best investors come out ahead. The majority of them near break even or lose money on a fund. At least this is what I've always found unless you have a source I could take a look at?

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#44

Post by basch »

chrissnell wrote: post #15

We've been running Kubernetes (500+ containers) in production for over a year now. I believe (and hope) that 2017 will be the year that persistent data storage will be solved. We are ready to move our data out of OpenStack and have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure. But, we're not there yet. The options just aren't good enough. L…

does VsphereVolume mean you can use data virtualization slash software defined storage like vSAN?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_virtualization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_storage

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#45

Post by BinaryIdiot »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #29
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #8

How many people were employed at ClusterHQ? Honestly I never even heard of the company but I had heard of some of the open source projects. Maybe I'm just out of the loop. Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious. > I’…

Well, a few thoughts. 1) It means you tried. Most people don't even get that far because they're too busy being terrified of failure 2) It means a hypotheses has been vetted and deemed not correct/successful, so something was learned. 3) I'm sure some of it is just trying to put a brave face on a shitty situation. If you try something, fail and then jump off a bridge because you're so donwn on yourself over it I'd sa…

> I'm sure some of it is just trying to put a brave face on a shitty situation. If you try something, fail and then jump off a bridge because you're so donwn on yourself over it I'd say that's the wrong approach. No one likes failure, but having a more positive mindset about it is healthier than the alternative.

There is a difference between having a positive mindset and looking at something that negatively affected a lot of people as a positive. I don't think those two have to be the same at all.

I would love to hear some feedback from the employees there, however :)

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#46

Post by ThrustVectoring »

Johnny555 wrote: post #32

It seems a little odd to do this 3 days before Christmas. Holiday depression is already a real problem, and making people unemployed a few days before the holiday sounds like a bad thing. And it's a terrible time to be job hunting. Why not hold on a few more weeks, let employees enjoy the holidays and announce in mid-January when employees can actually talk to hiring managers and get some good job prospects instead o…

Given that the venture will fail anyways, it's always better to figure this out sooner rather than later. Like, take the money that would have been spent on salary for those extra weeks, and pay it out as severance.

There's arguments to be made for stretching things out if it means funds get spent as salary rather than paying things back to investors, but this is an allocational waste (employees do work for no real benefit) for a distributive gain (employees get money rather than investors).

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#47

Post by hoodoof »

Johnny555 wrote: post #32

It seems a little odd to do this 3 days before Christmas. Holiday depression is already a real problem, and making people unemployed a few days before the holiday sounds like a bad thing. And it's a terrible time to be job hunting. Why not hold on a few more weeks, let employees enjoy the holidays and announce in mid-January when employees can actually talk to hiring managers and get some good job prospects instead o…

Because a day in business costs money.

If the company is out of money then you shut it down regardless of anything at all.

Running for a single day longer only makes the problem worse and presumably spends money that does not exist - someone needs to pay the money the employees earn.

Keeping people feeling nice isn't how to run a business that is at the endpoint of its lifecycle.

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#48

Post by hinkley »

geofft wrote: post #24
acidbaseextract wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-c... Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way. Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation.

Having a culture where failure is okay is different from having a culture where failure is valued . Like the parent commenter said, if failure means you look back at what happened, learn some lessons, do better next time, then that's fine, you've gotten value out of failure. If you say "Hey, I got a failure out of the way," you're playing slots and falling victim to the gambler's fallacy. > Make New Mistakes. Make gl…

David Anderson (kanban) once observed that if your estimates are accurate then they should be wrong about half the time (and half of those overestimated).

The pressure to make them into promises instead of estimates is, I think, a form of failure aversion, one that Almost everyone deals with and one that causes a lot of unnecessary drama.

I don't remember whose quote this is, but the old line about how if you aren't failing from time to time it means you aren't trying hard enough. Your reach can't exceed your grasp if you don't reach at all.

However its easy to fail from sheer stupidity as well. Failure is a trapping of success, not an indicator.

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#49

Post by geertj »

chrissnell wrote: post #15

We've been running Kubernetes (500+ containers) in production for over a year now. I believe (and hope) that 2017 will be the year that persistent data storage will be solved. We are ready to move our data out of OpenStack and have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure. But, we're not there yet. The options just aren't good enough. L…

> The options just aren't good enough.

I'd be curious to understand your storage requirements as a production Kubernetes user. What would you like to see for performance, cost and RPO/RTO?

Re: ClusterHQ is shutting down

#50

Post by Johnny555 »

mangeletti wrote: post #39
Johnny555 wrote: post #32

It seems a little odd to do this 3 days before Christmas. Holiday depression is already a real problem, and making people unemployed a few days before the holiday sounds like a bad thing. And it's a terrible time to be job hunting. Why not hold on a few more weeks, let employees enjoy the holidays and announce in mid-January when employees can actually talk to hiring managers and get some good job prospects instead o…

It's likely that people within the organization already knew things weren't going well. So, the bright side of this is that: A) employees can spend the entire holiday week or two with their families, and B) employees can start out their new year unencumbered by the stress of working for a failing company Personally, I'd rather have it this way than come back from whatever fun holiday adventure I'm on to find out a we…

Sure, there could be mitigating circumstances, but I've worked for a startup that folded just after Christmas while the office was closed for the holiday, we were all fired by phone.

It sucked.

Spending the holidays with family can be even more stress inducing when you've just learned that you lost your job. No ability to go out with local friends or former coworkers to commiserate about being fired and talk about job prospects. I was too distracted with job searching to really relax and enjoy time with family.

Rumor was that the investors pulled the plug before the end of the year for tax reasons, but I'm skeptical since it took months to sell off assets (physical and virtual) and wind down the business.

I made out pretty well though, got a lucrative contract with the company that bought the core software to keep it running for them until they could merge it into their systems.

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