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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#51

Post by hosh »

Annatar wrote: post #7
rubin55 wrote: post #2

Here's a blog explaining the decision : https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-announces-strategic-chang...

That doesn't explain anything really. What I want to know is what actually went on behind closed doors. Everything else is corporate public relations. In these cases hearsay is often far more accurate and reliable than these carefully worded statements. The statement implies that Samsung's hunger for resources had grown so large that there is no more room for the public hosting side of the business, but considering h…

Might be better to ask this on Quora. Maybe someone not bound by an NDA will answer.

On the other hand, the single-tenant customer is plausible. I know Samsung invested in a lot of technology in the past five years. The Viv team is still around (acquired around the same time as Joyent), and there is quite a bit of IoT Samsung is building into their appliances.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#52

Post by unexpected »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #31
velcrovan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, in 2008 Joyent was Twitter’s host and asked them to leave.

Interesting. TextDrive (which turned into Joyent) was one of the first Ruby on Rails hosting options, and Twitter was first built as a RoR app.

another fun fact: a lot of the early HackerNews posts were the daily drama of Twitter's RoR struggles.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#53

Post by cbsmith »

skrebbel wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node…

Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). The expanded into offering Linux using some clever stuff to support Linux runtime on Solaris (kind of like WINE, but much simpler since Linux is much more similar to Solaris and also fully open source). All with DTrace so you had some great transparency on what was going on with the underlying hardware.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#55

Post by jlarocco »

skrebbel wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node…

> But oh, they're cancelling the public cloud, which I assume was the hosting service?

Public cloud != Private cloud

It looks like at the very least they still offer private "cloud" hosting.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#56

Post by abrowne »

unexpected wrote: post #52
TimTheTinker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. TextDrive (which turned into Joyent) was one of the first Ruby on Rails hosting options, and Twitter was first built as a RoR app.

another fun fact: a lot of the early HackerNews posts were the daily drama of Twitter's RoR struggles.

I kind of miss seeing the Fail Whale.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#57

Post by jonathonf »

tosh wrote: post #27
TimTheTinker wrote: post #23

TextDrive (bought by Joyent) was one of the first hosting services to support Ruby On Rails as a first-class service -- in the days when static hosting, PHP, Perl, and Java/Tomcat were the only options on Linux infrastructure. They were well-noted for their "lifetime hosting" membership deal, which was incredibly exciting at the time (this was in a day where flat-fee and free hosting outside the likes of MySpace and…

Also I just remembered Strongspace (which was one of their products back then), very compelling and well designed online storage (e.g. for backup) back then. In a way this could have grown into Dropbox or Box when you think of it. The Joyent email + calendar + notes web app was also quite impressive at the time. So many memories.

Strongspace still exists and is still hosting the VC storage accounts which Joyent shed (or at least, I think so... parts of their site seem to be dead).

ExpanDrive's "Cloud drive client software" is also well worth looking into.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#59

Post by bcantrill »

cookiecaper wrote: post #37
skrebbel wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node…

My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being…

While I appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my future endeavors, know that you will likely be disappointed: the beauty of open source is that it endures on the strength of its ideas alone -- and telling a group of people to stop working on a technology simply because you find alternatives scary is unlikely to be convincing. One of the most important lessons I have drawn from the many open source communities that Joyent has participated in is that large communities are not necessarily stronger ones -- and that sometimes the smallest communities are the strongest of all. In this regard, software communities are reflections of their shared values, a notion that I expanded on at length in a Node Summit talk a few years ago.[1] So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen.

[1] https://vimeo.com/230142234 (slides: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-as-reflection-...)

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#60

Post by cookiecaper »

masklinn wrote: post #43
cookiecaper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being…

> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. I man not really, Joyent is a hosting company (cloud & virtualisation). That's built upon an Illumos distribution (SmartOS) but SmartOS is not their business.

I guess it needs clarification that I'm not trying to indicate they relied on proprietary hardware platforms like SPARC or a 1990s big-iron licensing model. These days, it's acknowledged that rent-seeking by a million cuts is the only viable way to make money. Even Microsoft is acknowledging that.

SmartOS may've been indirectly implicated in revenue, but let's be real, illumos and Joyent have always been tied at the hip. Joyent was never going to become a Linux-centric alternative public cloud like AWS, GCloud, etc.

If there had been less ideological fervor and with Samsung's backing, maybe they could've offered more serious competition to the incumbents, but the Solaris style oozes out of Joyent's every pore. It's fundamental to their way of thinking. That purity and commitment is certainly admirable, but it's simply not commercially viable anymore.

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