81–90 of 289 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With technology which is an order of magnitude more concerned with reliability and easier to use than any competition out there, that's how.
Apparently not.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I thought Joyent was built around SmartOS? Although I never really understood the significance of the different Open Solaris forks. Or are these the same?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
When you compared the utility of JCP "tiny" instance (1 CPU worth of shares, 256MB of RAM) to a t2.micro or similar instance in AWS, the difference was astounding. Part of this is the CPU credit mechanism on T2 instances, but I'd wager that a good part of it was being in OS-level virtualisation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
There is still a great deal of administrative/technical value in using anything-but-Docker if you can tolerate the social stigma, but who can? The CxOs need that Docker/Kubernetes feather in their cap so they can look cool at conferences.
Suggesting SmartOS/illumos gets you sideways looks at the very bare minimum. When I stated that I was thinking about using it here over a year ago, my inbox was immediately flooded with accusations that I was part of a Joyent-bankrolled cabal, because clearly no sane ordinary person would consider such a dead platform. In the interim, OmniTI has gone belly-up and OpenZFS has deemed ZFS on Linux the rightful heir to the ZFS throne, and now the Joyent Public Cloud is shuttering. If the impression that you had to be part of a conspiracy to use SmartOS for a greenfield project was reasonable then, it's only more reasonable now.
The sun may yet rise again on illumos some day, but it's time to accept that it's well into the night now.
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
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…
That this came from a company essentially selling mini computers.
In fact, we are trying to do multi-tenant all over again. To my mind, this cycle of containerization is still trying to fulfill all the promises we were given in the early 90's about memory protected, pre-emptive multitasking OSes that never came true. Which itself wasn't the first time (it's all copying mainframe ideas, badly). Given all of the problems coming out about speculative execution and data breaches, I'm already curious what the next set of promises will look like.
Wow, 5 months is an insanely short timetable to ask people to migrate entire systems to another vendor. I’m surprised their contracts don’t have better terms.
Decisions like this are long in the making, this is just the public announcement for the rest of us.