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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#191

Post by Annatar »

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…

Sometimes it's worth fighting for to the end if that something you're fighting for is the right thing. And sometimes what happens is that the right thing does win out in the end, because it's better.

You're asking Rembrandt to stop painting realistic paintings because Picasso nowadays generally passes for art. What you don't consider is that there is nothing stopping Rembrandt from continuing to paint his realistic paintings for his own sake and pleasure.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#192

Post by ahartmetz »

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…

Looks like they copied Sun's business plan. Nobody including Sun knew how Sun was going to make money after the decline of their hardware business.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#193

Post by cryptonector »

Annatar wrote: post #170
cryptonector wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know Bryan personally -I wish I did-, but I am pretty sure he's hard to crush. There's always something else to do. Many of us Solaris Engineering refugees have gone on to do other things. And trust me, for me it was hard and still is because I don't yet get to use the new Linux eBPF stuff daily and w/o privilege for the equivalent of DTrace USDT, and I also don't get to use ZoL, and because systemd is a very…

Apart from this entry I don't see any discussion on what Sun did wrong, but since you broached the subject: - I'm furious about all the attention RISC V undeservedly gets while OpenSPARC is vastly superior in terms of mnemonics and virtual register windows and a free instruction every branch not taken and is GPL licensed; - not devoting enough attention to i86pc Solaris was a major mistake; - not selling cheap fully…

Eh, killing OpenSolaris was done by Oracle. While that was a side-effect of Oracle acquiring Sun, it's still on Oracle, so I won't apportion blame for that one on Sun execs.

The death of MySQL is certainly a good thing, but it's not really dead. People use it still.

SPARC was a dead end.

I too wish Bryan well. And the rest of the Sun diaspora. I miss them!

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#194

Post by zzzcpan »

Annatar wrote: post #181
zzzcpan wrote: post #127

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 > 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…

Sun Microsystems literally invented the network is the computer . They were the first company ever to even begin to think in terms of distributed systems on a network scale (DEC had done some pioneering work on the hardware front prior to that with VMS, but not the network). The network file system, NFS, exists because Sun Microsystems engineers willed it so -- they wanted to multiply the computational power of small…

All of this experience is pretty shallow and completely irrelevant to distributed systems in the age of the cloud computing and the internet. For some reason Sun ignored the internet and didn't move into distributed systems at all. So, for example, this experience at Sun couldn't help the engineers in any way to build a distributed key-value storage for the cloud, while Amazon was publishing stuff like Dynamo paper.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#195

Post by cbsmith »

throw0101a wrote: post #71
cbsmith wrote: post #53

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…

> 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%…

> When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC.

Nope. Solaris Zones.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#196

Post by cbsmith »

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…

...I get voted up and then a day later I realize I made my usual mistake of typing in "Illuminos" instead of "Illumos". Apologies to everyone who suffered through reading that.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#197

Post by cbsmith »

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…

It really is disorienting when you pop open the man page and actually is all the documentation you need.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#198

Post by Thaxll »

Annatar wrote: post #161
Thaxll wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By using Solaris / re-implementig KVM on different arch / platform, ofc it's the wrong approach, on one side you what 100s eng at Joyent working on that, where the rest of the world uses native KVM, x86, Linux ect ... it's just not possible on a tech level to compete.

SmartOS beats GNU/Linux feature for feature and it has features like fault management architecture that are science fiction for Linux. For example, it will migrate affected memory pages from portions of the chip with too many parity errors and it will off-line the chip if necessary, but the server will continue to function. All of that will be uniformly reported on top of that and is visible with fmadm faulty. I can…

I see multiple problems with that way of thinking, first HW will fail and AWS, Google ect ... showed us that you should not invest in very sophisticated things for those kind of problems.

It feels that you're building something to avoid HW issue but they will happen no mater what so it's better to invest in HA with a mix of standard servers + SW.

And solaris zones... all the modern tooling are built around Linux / Docker / Kubernetes ect ... so why should I use something that no one uses and lagged behind in term of tooling? Solaris zones are doing 1% of what a modern cloud is capable ( like Kubernetes )

Linux is the present and the future if you think with a small company you can change that you are very wrong, by the time SmartOS get something you have Intel, IBM, RH, Google, AWS that all work on Linux that have thousands of people working on many more things, not to mention HW implementation, and that's not even talking about HW integration, pricing, security, support ect ...

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#199

Post by SwellJoe »

Nux wrote: post #128

I fondly remember Joyent as one of the first companies to do Ruby on Rails hosting right. They were using a combo of FreeBSD, Virtualmin, Apache (proxying to mongrel etc). Fun times!

They were probably our (Virtualmin) biggest user for a few years. They used the Open Source version so we didn't see much revenue from it (occasionally their users would upgrade to the commercial version), but they sponsored a few Solaris-related features in Virtualmin/Webmin and sent us patches now and then. The shared hosting stuff that used Virtualmin was TextDrive, and once they moved to container-based products they stopped including a control panel at some point (and they're container management stuff didn't use our tools for that), so we lost touch with them.

Edit: It's also how Twitter used Virtualmin in their early days, as they were hosted at Joyent. (I didn't know this until Evan Williams told me at a YC event. That was pretty cool.)

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#200

Post by kbenson »

cbsmith wrote: post #197
kbenson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really is disorienting when you pop open the man page and actually is all the documentation you need.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
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