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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#201

Post by [deleted] »

SwellJoe wrote: post #168
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…

"perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market" Joyent made money and was acquired, all while producing metric shit tons of incredibly cool Open Source software. We should all be so "monomaniacal".

[deleted]

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#202

Post by jmarneweck »

davidpaulyoung wrote: post #39
tosh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I just remembered Strongspace (which was one of their products back then), very compelling and well designed online storage (e.g. for backup) back then. In a way this could have grown into Dropbox or Box when you think of it. The Joyent email + calendar + notes web app was also quite impressive at the time. So many memories.

Good memories! https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joy...

Hey David! Good memories. David glad to hear you've sorted your demons out! If you are ever in Cape Town, drop by to say hi.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#203

Post by jmarneweck »

imperialdrive wrote: post #112
joeblubaugh wrote: post #6

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.

If anyone reading this has less than 100 servers running with them, I am capable to handle turnkey documented migration in <60 days to a provider of your choice.

ex-cloud ops from Joyent here. I've done the literal migration of TextDrive and Joyent's shared hosting off them (300+ Solaris Zones and loads of legacy FreeBSD Servers) so ping me if you need help migrating. jmarneweck at gmail dot com.

I also have experience running SmartOS on Leaseweb (they purchased Uniquity Hosting where I setup SmartOS instances on numerous servers in numerous datacentres.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#204

Post by jmarneweck »

SwellJoe wrote: post #199
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…

Evan was a lifetimer. Twitter's mail was routed via one.textdrive.com if memory serves me correctly using a truck load of aliases to redirect to offsite email accounts.

It was a pleasure dealing with the Virtualmin team on issues we had on Virtualmin on Joyent and TextDrive's shared hosting services.

Replying to the "Wins over GCE/AWS above that I can't reply to":

They had various:

* The ability to run workloads at near bare metal speeds (their using Solaris Containers).

* Manta (ability to perform compute operations on their storage service without having to download files and reupload files).

* Their work on getting a better user experience in zones with pkgsrc (thanks to all the hard work of Filip and Jonathan).

* Better performance and having the ability to spend less money on resources and reducing the instance count for folks moving off AWS to Joyent. I was involved in a number of these migrations.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#205

Post by jmarneweck »

elijahwright wrote: post #99
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.

Joyent has had nowhere near hundreds of engineers, I'm sorry to say. Small tribe with amazing results.

It used to amaze Joyent's clients how small Joyent's Cloud Operations team was.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#206

Post by jmarneweck »

hjhart wrote: post #167
jpgvm wrote: post #29

End of an era. Lots of good stuff to come out of Joyent and I hope we don't see the end of their OSS contributions. Manatee (the state machine behind Manta PostgreSQL HA), the SmartOS KVM port, Triton itself - huge body of great stuff in addition to Illumos contributions that they are perhaps better known for.

Manta was one of the most exciting technologies I touched five years ago. Color me impressed when I inline `sed` replaced 3TB of logs (2.5 years worth) in 30 seconds on our manta storage.

Used it for the backing store for the npm's registry when tarballs were moved out of CouchDB. Managed to cope with us flushing the CDN cache (Fastly) and not fall over with users downloading packages.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#207

Post by bcantrill »

zzzcpan wrote: post #194
Annatar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know, whenever I vow to stop explaining Sun, there is some yet-more outrageous claim that I just can't seem to summon the willpower to ignore, for fear that it will join a corpus of alternative facts that poison the wellspring of future generations.

So, in that spirit: Sun emphatically did not "ignore the internet" (?!) -- and was in fact a pioneer of distributed systems in many ways. Instead of rattling off the many important, early distributed systems that Sun built -- or the many pioneers of distributed systems that Sun employed -- I will vector you to a single Sun-authored paper circa 1994, "A Note on Distributed Computing"[1] (and to Chris Meiklejohn's discussion of it at Papers We Love[2]). The paper itself drips with wisdom that still feels current and important a quarter of a century later -- and it very much reflects the zeitgeist of the time at Sun. Please read the paper -- and more generally, take the time to educate yourself as to the history of our domain and the many people and companies who have made seminal contributions to it; the generations whose shoulders your work stands upon will thank you for it!

[1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79mjsLdkpY

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#208

Post by mpweiher »

bcantrill wrote: post #207
zzzcpan wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know, whenever I vow to stop explaining Sun, there is some yet-more outrageous claim that I just can't seem to summon the willpower to ignore, for fear that it will join a corpus of alternative facts that poison the wellspring of future generations. So, in that spirit: Sun emphatically did not "ignore the internet" (?!) -- and was in fact a pioneer of distributed systems in many ways. Instead of rattling off the…

Just to add to the "ignored the internet" bit:

This is the company that had "the dot in .com" as its marketing slogan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA

https://slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1542217/sun-no-longer-th...

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#209

Post by jen20 »

merb wrote: post #172
jen20 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking here about the managed Kubernetes offerings from AWS and Azure. As for when I last used them: waiting for provisioning right now (18 mins and counting) is affording me the time to comment on this article.

maybe you should use gcloud gke. or even digitalocean, they provision in under then minutes aswell. not sure why aws and azure take so long.

I work on provisioning tools, I use all of them. I've definitely seen GKE take just as long as the others...

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#210

Post by jen20 »

Annatar wrote: post #188
jen20 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Triton itself is a very non-trivial install Actually I'd say the Triton install is not only trivial, but should be a model for other similar systems. During my testing with Intel NUCs, I had a usable system deploying containers in under 20 minutes. Most managed Kubernetes systems cannot even provision in that time frame. > you just can't run SmartOS on the cloud. The installer may lead you to the USB and install pa…

How long did it take you to install Triton? How many systems did you need to install Triton? How much memory did(do) the individual systems running Triton have? Which documentation did you follow to install Triton?

The total time to install across 4 hosts was probably 15 mins or so. There used to be a post on the Joyent blog that explained the setup for small scale, I'm not sure if it is still there.
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