Joyent Public Cloud EOL • Hacker News Board

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#211

Post by SwellJoe » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

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.

This is just willful ignorance.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#212

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #208

bcantrill wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording.

Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance towards the internet.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#213

Post by timClicks » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #212

mpweiher wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance tow…

"The network is the computer" doesn't feel like a slogan that a company ignoring distributed systems would use

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#214

Post by aramallo » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

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…

Moreover, Sun’s legacy in distributed system goes far beyond theory, people forget about Jini (and Javaspaces) a distributed computing platform that shipped by 2000 or before (I had the pleasure to work with and it was the only reason I would develop in Java), SOA? micro services? In-memory distributed computing? It was all there at work. Want P2P?, enter JXTA. There you go.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#215

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #212

mpweiher wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance tow…

[deleted]

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#216

Post by mpweiher » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 8:15 PM UTC

timClicks wrote: post #213

zzzcpan wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance tow…

"The network is the computer" doesn't feel like a slogan that a company ignoring distributed systems would use

Ahh yes, knew I was forgetting an important one...

Oh, and SUN was the Stanford University Network.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#217

Post by KirinDave » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 8:33 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #212

mpweiher wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance tow…

Why does ZFS reflect a lack of experience in the internet and/or distributed systems? Simply because it didn't follow a questionable tech trend of "everything is a DHT?"

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#218

Post by Nux » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

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…

That's a nice bit of trivia! Had no idea Twitter started on Virtualmin at Joyent.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#219

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

timClicks wrote: post #213

zzzcpan wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance tow…

"The network is the computer" doesn't feel like a slogan that a company ignoring distributed systems would use

I guess I rephrase: they didn't do any of the distributed systems stuff necessary for the cloud if people so desperately want to call all the network stuff they did "distributed systems". Technically they were distributed systems, sure, just like anything client-server, but irrelevant to the challenges of fault tolerant geographically distributed asynchronously communicating systems.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#220

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #217

zzzcpan wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance tow…

Why does ZFS reflect a lack of experience in the internet and/or distributed systems? Simply because it didn't follow a questionable tech trend of "everything is a DHT?"

Because they didn't seem to know any of the simple and nice ideas from distributed systems to solve pain points of managing space, since adding, removing nodes, sharding/partitioning is something you have to figure out pretty much from the start.