Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Joyent Public Cloud EOL

docs.joyent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 289 posts

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#101

Post by rsync »

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…

"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."

Here is an old, historical thread that gives some context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669

I have a hazy recollection of their being part of the "free thumper" startup program that Sun Microsystems offered, briefly, and then later, blowing up one of those thumpers and losing a whole clouds worth of data... here it is:

https://adtmag.com/articles/2008/01/21/strongspaces-10day-cr...

Later, they were briefly (in)famous for voiding everyones lifetime shared hosting agreements:

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

"Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce."

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#102

Post by SwellJoe »

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…

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time.

One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon's massive scale washed over the whole market. The founders did well, so it's not like they "lost", but it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built).

Also worth noting, their stack is open source in ways that nobody else is, I think. Maybe Google is doing right with Kubernetes, but everybody else is consuming OSS software to build proprietary clouds and giving basically nothing back. Joyent were doing most of the work, and giving most of the tech away.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#103

Post by wahern »

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…

Technically SPARC is an open standard, and importantly Fujitsu sells their own hardware. OpenBSD has done some pretty cool mitigations on SPARC. What killed SPARC was that there hasn't been entry-level hardware for over 15 years. ARM become popular because of things like the Beagleboard and later Raspberry Pi. Enthusiasts and developers could experiment and familiarize themselves with the ecosystem, building mindshare and expertise.

Sun would have done better to have made SPARC hardware more accessible than to have open sourced Solaris. Hindsight is 20/20, but now that we've reached the limits of single-threaded performance Sun's emphasis on multi-threading and specialized ISA extensions would have made both Solaris and SPARC competitive today.

Getting there would have required cannibalizing their enterprise income, though, and that's difficult if not impossible for any company to do. They made the gamble on Solaris because it was less risky--major enterprises were always going to stick to Sun's Solaris--but low-end SPARC hardware absolutely would have hurt their bottom line.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#104

Post by kbenson »

SwellJoe wrote: post #102
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…

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon…

> it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built).

I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't sure how to interpret that initially), I think means that they'll provide their software and managemest system for private install for large orgs in their private deployments, maybe along with a support/management contract?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#105

Post by rjzzleep »

kbenson wrote: post #96
rjzzleep wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I have a smartos setup because for now it still runs quite stable. Joyent/SmartOS was the one that added KVM support and a bunch of other features to the kernel, but I think it was merged into IllumOS. It's quite limited and has a clunky interface. When I tried to contact anyone there to add UEFI boot support there wasn't even so much of a: "we don't care". The problem with SmartOS, Illumos and the rest o…

Not a IllumOS/SmartOS user, but can you comment on how good the man pages are? What you state is sometimes a complaint I hear about OpenBSD, but from my experience using OpenBSD (which was mostly almost a decade ago now) is that's because they actually put a huge amount of effort into making sure the man pages were not just correct, but comprehensive (to the point of requiring code patches to include an accompanying…

These are so different use cases. Good luck trying to find out how to do your network design with the dladm and good luck trying to understand the capabilities and limitations of etherstub from the manpages.

But yeah the structure of the OpenBSD man pages looks ok. Where you put proper structured documentation doesn't really matter IMHO.

It's conceptually different. You can easily use the OpenBSD manpages, because they map nicely to every other Unix system concept.

https://smartos.org/man/1M/dladm

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#106

Post by SwellJoe »

kbenson wrote: post #104
SwellJoe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon…

> it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built). I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't s…

That's basically putting technology out to pasture. When you've got a handful of large corporate customers that depend on a product, you can continue to extract money out of them for years or decades without the product having a future.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#107

Post by unixhero »

rjzzleep wrote: post #93
bogomipz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Disclaimer: I have a smartos setup because for now it still runs quite stable. Joyent/SmartOS was the one that added KVM support and a bunch of other features to the kernel, but I think it was merged into IllumOS. It's quite limited and has a clunky interface. When I tried to contact anyone there to add UEFI boot support there wasn't even so much of a: "we don't care". The problem with SmartOS, Illumos and the rest o…

No need for a disclaimer. Thanks for the comment.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#108

Post by protomyth »

bcantrill wrote: post #15
60sec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this has more to do with goals and focus than cost/efficiency. In many tech companies the scarcest resource is man-hours for development/maintenance. The order of complexity for public cloud/multi-tenant is much higher than for private/single-tenant, especially given the recent onslaught of CPU vulnerabilities. Still a big loss. I imagine it must feel like a defeat, especially to Bryan, given the corporate cu…

I don't know that I had personalized it quite that deeply, but it's certainly an end of an era for us and for our public cloud customers. The technology is alive and well, and being used more broadly than ever for on-premises infrastructure. In that regard, the costs of the public cloud are less in the technology, and more in the surround of support, billing, etc. Certainly, the (significant) work that we had to do f…

Will this affect Triton SmartOS?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#109

Post by unixhero »

snaky wrote: post #95
hinkley wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the overengineering in J2EE comes from essentially trying to make one app server be multitenant instead of just spinning up one process per tenant. 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 protecte…

Didn't AS/400 fulfill the promise? OTOH it may been considered 'mini-mainframe'.

Yes. And it was awesome.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#110

Post by cookiecaper »

throw0101a wrote: post #98
hinkley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will also hear a lot of bragging about how much more robust the partitioning is on Solaris versus Linux. Which is why they did the work to get Linux containers running on top of Solaris instead of just doing Linux.

I haven't been paying attention recently, but last time I checked, there were no known escapes out of Solaris zones, while there are quite a few CVEs about escaping Linux containers and even QEMU/KVM/Xen. The one escape out of FreeBSD jails that I'm aware of (CVE-2005-2218) involved not a bug in the jails code, but by burrowing out via devfs. So it seems that OS-level virtualization/security has a better track record…

Yes, for a very long time the Linux devs were emphatic that cgroups should be not be treated as an actual isolation/security barrier. This was flagrantly ignored and like most things in the Linux ecosystem, the functionality was eventually kinda-sorta backfilled based on the community's refusal to accept anything else. Meanwhile, FreeBSD and Solaris had quietly provided coherent tools to accomplish the same ends securely for many years.

The story of the BSDs and illumos is really a tragedy about the complete and total disconnect between technical quality+value and technology adoption. People utilize technology products as fashion statements first and foremost, and the Linux fashion was easily the most desirable -- indeed, aside from PC v. Mac, it's the only one generally known by average technophiles.

As a technical entrepreneur, I've discovered the sad reality that it's really only the most superficial 10% of any functionality that drives virtually all adoption. Everything else is marketing, even in supposedly heavily-technical endeavors like running an open-source kernel. The more you invest in engineering beyond that initial superficial component, the less you have to invest in brand promotion.

One can choose to gratify their own sense of righteousness and ignore this, and that is certainly a valid option to take, but then they shouldn't be surprised to see their lunch eaten by someone who took the other side of the bargain.

Post reply on HN