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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#71

Post by throw0101a »

cbsmith wrote: post #53
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 har…

> Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris).

When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC.

The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better hardware utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#72

Post by throw0101a »

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 always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it.

The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#73

Post by httpsterio »

randylahey wrote: post #42
traek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joyent created Node.js

Ryan Dahl created Node.js prior to being hired at Joyent, and then sold them the rights to it.

The iojs debacle was because joyent had too much governance of the project and it was subsequently handed over to the board that currently governs nodejs. While the first Iines of what became nodejs weren't written by joyent, they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#74

Post by derefr »

cookiecaper wrote: post #66
bcantrill wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and com…

There’s a gap in perspectives here, I think, which is roughly similar to that between Minix and Linux. Software doesn’t always have to compromise to pragmatism, because there’s nothing requiring that software be developed to be used.

Sometimes a reference implementation is intended to be just that, and nothing more—a reference, for other implementors of other systems to crib ideas from, especially as pertains to how the smaller ideas cohere architecturally in practice (which is hard to communicate by just writing papers about the individual ideas, or building them as standalone libraries, or building them into other systems where they must interoperate with components that don’t cohere into the desired architecture.)

Or, to put that another way: sometimes the best textbook is the codebase of a good implementation. And some people are more interested in writing those textbooks, than in personally getting their ideas into production systems. Especially because it’s far easier to refine the ideas in the context of such a coherent presentation of them.

Someone else, who reads such a “textbook” codebase, can put the ideas to work. But the ideas themselves will be better-developed for having had time to stew in the same pot as other novel ideas. This serves the people who put the ideas into practice as well.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#76

Post by user5994461 »

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…

Let me give you some hearsay then from working in both megacorps and hosting.

Running a public cloud requires a massive amount of people, unlike what you seem to think. It takes one or two orders of magnitude more work to do anything public rather than internal. Bet there is no resource and no budget to keep running their public cloud anymore. It's a small company, don't have unlimited resources.

Second, there are no revenues, no future and no clients on their public cloud. Solaris for all intent and purpose is dead (it pains me to say that but that's a fact). What companies run Solaris in this decade? None. Plus hosting competition is at an all time high, DigitalOcean and other on the cheap side, AWS and Google on the enterprise side.

Samsung is a massive company and all massive companies have massive internal systems and need for internal infrastructure. I bet there is plenty of work that needs to be done internally that is much more valuable than public cloud. There they go.

If you've worked in any F50, you would know that the sheer amount of servers and desktops is larger than an AWS datacenter. They are all cloud hosting, internal or external, whether that's their main business or not.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#77

Post by cookiecaper »

derefr wrote: post #74
cookiecaper wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and com…

There’s a gap in perspectives here, I think, which is roughly similar to that between Minix and Linux. Software doesn’t always have to compromise to pragmatism, because there’s nothing requiring that software be developed to be used . Sometimes a reference implementation is intended to be just that, and nothing more—a reference , for other implementors of other systems to crib ideas from, especially as pertains to ho…

whynotboth.gif. illumos can continue in purity while the full-time team interacts with others. That is the best way to see the principles can be successfully grafted in -- show that they have practical and immediate utility in the real world, even if they can't be implemented wholesale overnight. A pure textbook implementation is great as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, especially in today's highly-competitive internal engineering environments.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#78

Post by spooneybarger »

maxxxxx wrote: post #70
bcantrill wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are the guy who warned about anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, right? So true and so fun.

That is something Bryan has done.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#79

Post by jaytaylor »

throw0101a wrote: post #72
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 always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation

In this case, do clouds with physical bare-metal provisioning capabilities like EC2 / GCP / Azure / OCI kill the Joyent value proposition?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#80

Post by rhinoceraptor »

alynn wrote: post #64
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 This is by far the best explanation I have heard. Suddenly Joyent makes sense to me after all these years. They have been continuing to do what Sun did. In a very similar way to how Sun followed the fatal strategy of simultaneously trying to make money selling proprietary Unix hardware, while also making their software open source and porting it…

The original pitch of Node.js matched well with Unix, it was a simple programming model that exploited async I/O abstractions in Unix.
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