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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#141

Post by cyphar »

kragen wrote: post #135
pron wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison fo…

Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond…

He has said he regrets it in a Reddit AMA[1]. I find it quite strange that you attribute the death of an entire company to the attitude of a single engineer in an email from 1996 where he made a silly remark. You'd think if Cantrill was that powerful of a king-maker you'd want to be much nicer to him. Not to mention that Cantrill himself is also clearly a nerd, so "nerd-hating" is a bit of a weird statement.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/comment/cq3e4y...

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#142

Post by cyphar »

wmf wrote: post #34
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 has been a subsidiary of Samsung for a few years (presumably running Samsung's internal private cloud) and I guess they are now focusing almost entirely on Samsung and their public cloud was a distraction that didn't make much money.

Samsung acquired them because of their public cloud infrastructure -- they were Joyent customers for a long time and clearly decided that buying them would be the cheapest way to continue using them. As mentioned in TFA, they are only shutting down their multi-tenant cloud and are keeping their dedicated cloud business (which is what Samsung uses).

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#143

Post by bcantrill »

pron wrote: post #131
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…

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison fo…

To be clear, I have never blamed Ellison for the demise of Sun or even Solaris -- but I do blame Oracle for re-proprietarizing OpenSolaris, and thereby ripping up the social contract of copyright assignment in an open source project. If it must be said, this wasn't an isolated incident -- and in hindsight, was merely the front of a conga line bad Oracle behavior.

As for my own putative ignorance of market demands, one of Sun's growth areas at the time of acquisition in terms of revenue was the group that I had co-founded within Sun[1][2] -- in part because we had listened carefully to the market, and built a product that it very much wanted.

Finally, if we want to engage in the perennial musing as to the demise of Sun, I think for my part I still broadly stand by my analysis from 2011.[3]

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-...

[2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#144

Post by dymk »

tjfontaine wrote: post #5

I can say without a doubt, if it weren’t for Joyent, my fantastic coworkers, and the experience and opportunity they granted me I wouldn’t be where I am today. I fondly remember debugging issues and learning so much with my talented coworkers. Congratulations Joyeurs on everything you’ve done to forward the Public Cloud and Systems Engineering.

> Joyeurs

Please tell me this is a play on the word Voyeurs

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#145

Post by bcantrill »

kragen wrote: post #135
pron wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison fo…

Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond…

Ha ha -- wow! I had no idea that I possessed such power over time and space! As has already been pointed out to you (and has been pointed out repeatedly on HN over the years), I do regret the remark. So, there's that.

I would also note that the rise of Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s corresponds with the performance of x86 surpassing the performance of the RISC microprocessors during that same period -- a time when the only other open source Unix was operating under a legal cloud from AT&T. It seems likely that these forces played a greater role than a twentysomething engineer shooting his mouth off on Usenet...

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#146

Post by taariqlewis »

bcantrill wrote: post #145
kragen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond…

Ha ha -- wow! I had no idea that I possessed such power over time and space! As has already been pointed out to you (and has been pointed out repeatedly on HN over the years), I do regret the remark. So, there's that. I would also note that the rise of Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s corresponds with the performance of x86 surpassing the performance of the RISC microprocessors during that same period -- a tim…

Those were the days!

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#147

Post by X-Istence »

sean0- wrote: post #68
X-Istence wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any blog posts/email threads you'd point people to if they want to read more about the work that was done? I'd love to see and read about some of the things you ran into, and how you accomplished some of those high speed transfers.

The best talk I gave on this wasn’t recorded (and had another section on the details of the new MBUF struct that mmacy came up with), but here are a few pointers for the time being: https://youtu.be/La4ekkKbM5o https://github.com/joyent/freebsd/tree/projects/VPC https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SeanChittenden/freebsd-vpc...

It looks like that FreeBSD GitHub repo is private.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#148

Post by anonymouz »

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…

They'll forever remain on my mind for their rip-off "lifetime hosting". I paid a lot of money for it, and it was supposed to last while the company lasted. But then they were folded into Joyent and the lifetime deals discontinued (with just a little bit limited time hosting offered in compensation).

I have stayed away from them forever since, and warned everybody I could about their terrible business practices.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#149

Post by jclulow »

kenned3 wrote: post #134
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…

This. Well put. when eveyone was hooked on VM's and other nonsense they had 'branded zones' running. The learning curve was high, but worth it once you had it running. Sad to see them leave. wonder what i will do with my SmartOS based media server now?

For what it's worth, we're still maintaining SmartOS and it's still open source!

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#150

Post by 3xblah »

kragen wrote: post #135
pron wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison fo…

Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqb4V9GxaBo

If I am not mistaken, Cantrill stole the line from this skit.

"The good old days." I actually went to a Star Trek convention as a kid back in the late 70's/early 80's, don't remember the year.

It was a different time. "Cool" meant something different back then. People really could say "Get a life!" and it was not an insult. It was truth. There was more to life back then than computers.

(There still is, but today this simple truth is being lost on many more people.)

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