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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#151

Post by bdha »

cyphar wrote: post #142
wmf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This origin story is not entirely accurate[0]. (I spent almost four years helping build datacenters for Samsung _Mobile_, who actually bought Joyent.)

[0] https://github.com/joyent?q=manta

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#152

Post by alynn »

cyphar wrote: post #141
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…

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]: htt…

Consider the remark not as the cause of death of the company, but the remark as an instance of a general attitude, and that attitude fitting in quite well at the company.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#154

Post by joyent »

I just hate their stupid shitty name.

Joyent.

What an awful fucking name.

It's like the word you'd use to describe the sensation of injecting dish soap into your urethra.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#155

Post by kelp »

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…

Just as a side note here, Google is doing Kubernetes as a commoditize your compliment strategy (https://www.gwern.net/Complement) so they can sell other cloud compute services. This makes it easier for people to migrate their on-prem workloads to Kubernetes, and then to the cloud. This commoditize much of what Amazon was attempting with ECS. Forcing Amazon to fast follow with EKS, arguably a worse and much more complex to deploy product than Google GKE.

It makes it so it's hard to make money off container orchestration, but you can still make money off what Google is good at, or at least thinks they are good at. Selling compute, proprietary databases, and stuff like TPUs.

My point is that yes, Google is advancing the whole industry by releasing Kubernetes as opensource, but it's also a strategy to sell more of GCP and deny some revenue to competitors.

It remains to be seen if it works. GCP is still a distant 3rd in the cloud race and has a long way to go to improve their enterprise support. (Their usability is much nicer though...)

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#156

Post by kelp »

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…

I think you're right regarding x86 performance being a huge factor. Also my own experience, admining a number of Solaris systems in those days, I just found it more frustrating to use. The first thing I would do was put GNU userland on there to make a Solaris system more usable.

Later on when I had more say in what systems things ran on, I'd reach for Linux because it was easier. It was good enough. I could easily run it at home too, and it ran on cheap hardware.

I sometimes wonder how much that usability factor played a role...

Though AWS seems to be doing fine as a business, so maybe this theory about usability isn't so great.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#157

Post by kelp »

zzzcpan wrote: post #127
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…

> Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products > The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. None of that was ever true. Whether they had container-based or VM-based tech was a tiny unimportant detail for a cloud company. Although over engineering in this area certainly m…

I'm reminded of something a smart engineer said at work today. "Our customers don't care how we implement the system, they just care that it works"

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#158

Post by Annatar »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #114
Annatar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far, far from over as long as SmartOS remains easier to use and more reliable than GNU/Linux. The source code is there to fork, so just like GNU/Linux, there will be people working on it and using it. OpenBSD has 5.71 developers and yet they're kicking ass churning out security features and innovations like there's no tomorrow. I secured my copies of the illumos and SmartOS gates. Joyent is proof that large scal…

I'm sure SmartOS is very reliable once you get it up and running, but "easier to use" than Linux is one of the most "[citation needed]" comments I've seen on HN in a while. Perhaps for folks who've had long familiarity with Solaris, it's easy-peasy, but I never found an OpenSolaris distribution/derivative that was remotely friendly to Solaris newbies.

I'm an old Solaris diehard who grew up on Solaris, which was my first UNIX®️. I'm also a Solaris 7 and a Solaris 10 certified system administrator. So for me SmartOS is a walk in the park to use. I even prefer SVR4 tools over GNU.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#160

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #114
Annatar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far, far from over as long as SmartOS remains easier to use and more reliable than GNU/Linux. The source code is there to fork, so just like GNU/Linux, there will be people working on it and using it. OpenBSD has 5.71 developers and yet they're kicking ass churning out security features and innovations like there's no tomorrow. I secured my copies of the illumos and SmartOS gates. Joyent is proof that large scal…

I'm sure SmartOS is very reliable once you get it up and running, but "easier to use" than Linux is one of the most "[citation needed]" comments I've seen on HN in a while. Perhaps for folks who've had long familiarity with Solaris, it's easy-peasy, but I never found an OpenSolaris distribution/derivative that was remotely friendly to Solaris newbies.

I’m relatively a Solaris newbie, but I’ve always found smartos easier to manage than equivalent infrastructure on Linux: it’s a pain figuring out equivalent commands for free and top, etc. but the general system architecture is a lot easier to learn than the hodgepodge that is a typical Linux distribution (and I’ve been using Linux since Mandrake 7)
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