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The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

sandstorm.io

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Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#81

Post by kordless »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #18

Sad to here sandstorm.io didn't make it into a viable business for you. I can only imagine just how much energy went into it (and hopefully continues to go). When time allows, I'd very much appreciate a reflection on the economic viability for innovative infrastructure software in general (hosted vs enterprise sales, also taking RethinkDB's demise and that of other "new stack" startups into account, etc.), and I'm su…

The investment market for infrastructure software is difficult now. Some might put it another way, but I think it's challenging given the way that current market model choice moves back and forth between a preference for private or public offerings. Consider the evolution steps from MSPs to SaaS.

Of late, offerings that provide a hybrid approach to software seem to be emerging. Gravitational and Relicated are examples of toolsets for these types of modelss. Take logging as a service and the more traditional self hosted log solution. What would work best users would be one piece of software, which could run both on-premise and in the cloud on someone else's servers, or even someone else's service. On-prem, it might be managed by those who wrote it. Hosted, it might represent a segment of a larger market play for intelligent time series analytics and sold as a monthly revenue rollup.

Deploying these types of models will be interesting, but it's totally doable using some type of lightweight federation across services. Sandstorm represented a portion of the infrastructure needed to do simple deployments that felt like a hosted service. A service proving cryptocurrency payments for their APIs might be another piece of the puzzle.

I continue thinking about these new markets as new technology enables them.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#82

Post by snackai »

kentonv wrote: post #7
nilved wrote: post #6

Oh boy. I guess that's it for Sandstorm.

No. Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job.

Welcome to the dark side of the internet fucker. Cloudflare is a threat to a free internet. Try surfing with Tor these days sucker.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#84

Post by thejohnhenry »

kentonv wrote: post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

Hey Kenton!

Congratulations, I'm really happy for you, Jade, and the rest of the team.

I am sad about the projected lower development activity in Sandstorm in the coming months. You had a tremendous community/brand built up, which is very hard to do for decentralized web technology initiatives -- several independent chat groups I'm in are lamenting the news today. If you're aware of any groups discussing further development in the decentralization space, please let me know (email's in profile, or I will check this comment every hour or so).

Seriously great work so far.

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#85

Post by thejohnhenry »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #18

Sad to here sandstorm.io didn't make it into a viable business for you. I can only imagine just how much energy went into it (and hopefully continues to go). When time allows, I'd very much appreciate a reflection on the economic viability for innovative infrastructure software in general (hosted vs enterprise sales, also taking RethinkDB's demise and that of other "new stack" startups into account, etc.), and I'm su…

My thesis is that the 2016 elections have graduated this question into a pertinent political problem. The Facebooks and Twitters of 2020 will have to be built on something, and the current model of "VCs/existing tech companies/etc" controlling larger and larger portions of the stack is simply inoperable, long-term, for a free society.

Every VC-funded startup is premised implicitly on "full monopoly" as the endgame for exits that demand extremely high returns from investors. This worked really well from 2002 to 2016, and is still a really good model for a lot of software innovation, but we need to start seriously thinking about other funding models -- grants, not-for-profits, institutions like Harvard/MIT/Stanford, etc., to be involved in funding the next generation of web software technology.

I know this isn't a super popular opinion here :). I'm pretty confident in the reasoning, though. The solution to the sociopolitical problems Facebook unearths isn't "another Facebook", it's rigorous rethinking of the relationship between users, companies, data, and new software applications. Sandstorm was exactly the right next step, but unfortunately kentonv & co had to spend most of their time on enterprise sales, because this is the tail end of what the VC-funding-only ideology expects you to do if you want to enact widespread software innovations.

Another approach I think will work well: https://solid.mit.edu/

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#86

Post by thejohnhenry »

BuuQu9hu wrote: post #61
the_common_man wrote: post #31

Best of luck, kenton! If anyone is looking for alternatives: http://alternativeto.net/software/sandstorm-io/ . I think Cozy, Yunohost, Cloudron, arkOS are the closest alternatives (Bitnami is about 1-click images and DO/linode are about cloud servers). Would be great to hear about other alternatives...

Unless I missed something, none of these are capability-safe designs, whereas Sandstorm is capability-safe on the wire up to the edge of Capn Proto.

what does capability-safe mean?

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#87

Post by anonymousDan »

kordless wrote: post #81
tannhaeuser wrote: post #18

Sad to here sandstorm.io didn't make it into a viable business for you. I can only imagine just how much energy went into it (and hopefully continues to go). When time allows, I'd very much appreciate a reflection on the economic viability for innovative infrastructure software in general (hosted vs enterprise sales, also taking RethinkDB's demise and that of other "new stack" startups into account, etc.), and I'm su…

The investment market for infrastructure software is difficult now. Some might put it another way, but I think it's challenging given the way that current market model choice moves back and forth between a preference for private or public offerings. Consider the evolution steps from MSPs to SaaS. Of late, offerings that provide a hybrid approach to software seem to be emerging. Gravitational and Relicated are example…

When you say hybrid, do you mean hybrid for the same customer (i.e. parts or instances of the service running at the same time on-premise and in the cloud) or for different customers (i.e. a particular customer will either run on-premise or in the cloud, but not both)?

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#88

Post by kentonv »

thejohnhenry wrote: post #84
kentonv wrote: post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

Hey Kenton! Congratulations, I'm really happy for you, Jade, and the rest of the team. I am sad about the projected lower development activity in Sandstorm in the coming months. You had a tremendous community/brand built up, which is very hard to do for decentralized web technology initiatives -- several independent chat groups I'm in are lamenting the news today. If you're aware of any groups discussing further deve…

The community (including me) is continuing to organize on the sandstorm-dev mailing list (https://groups.google.com/group/sandstorm-dev) and #sandstorm on Freenode IRC. Definitely drop by and say hello!

https://sandstorm.io/community

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#89

Post by kentonv »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #18

Sad to here sandstorm.io didn't make it into a viable business for you. I can only imagine just how much energy went into it (and hopefully continues to go). When time allows, I'd very much appreciate a reflection on the economic viability for innovative infrastructure software in general (hosted vs enterprise sales, also taking RethinkDB's demise and that of other "new stack" startups into account, etc.), and I'm su…

I still think we had a reasonable business model. The problem is, it was enterprise-targeted, and none of us actually knew how to sell to (or even talk to) enterprise customers. It turns out this is a skill that is not easy to learn. We really should have hired for it, rather than trying to figure it out from first principles. But by the time we realized that, it was too late -- enterprise sales cycles are long so we needed a lot of lead time.

With more investment I think we could have made it work, but it turns out that once you run into any kind of "trouble" as a startup, getting further investment becomes incredibly hard -- and we were pretty bad at the fundraising game to start with (it is, essentially, sales, after all).

I don't think we have any particular evidence that Sandstorm wasn't viable as a technology or a business -- we just personally did not have the right skillset for the business model we chose. :/

Re: The Sandstorm Team Is Joining Cloudflare

#90

Post by msmith10101 »

kentonv wrote: post #9

Hi all, I'm not sure how responsive I'll be able to be on this thread since I'm in orientation today. :) But, here's the things I expect to be repeating a lot: - Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself. - Sandstorm is "my baby" and I'm not going to stop working on it just because I have a day job. Yes, it will slow down a bit -- but on the bright side, we were previously spending t…

Congrats! Since your LAN House is in Palo Alto do you take the Caltrain up there? What do you think of the commute? I myself am between jobs now and trying to settle on a place - currently located in SF but thinking of moving to Palo Alto.
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