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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#221

Post by csirac2 »

zzzcpan wrote: post #219
timClicks wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

... Does this statement come from having actually used things like Hadoop on Sun Grid Engine or any of Sun's other products? Or... what? What knowledge are you drawing on?

Edit: I mean, this is the company that gave us the 8 Fallacies of distributed computing, as they were 20yrs ago

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#222

Post by nailer »

dboreham wrote: post #189
nailer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigitalOcean have no serverless product and just spent a bunch of engineering resources on a new customer-managed Kubernetes setup. The amount of people who are unsatisfied with DO's VM product and would be satisfied with a k8s product is tiny. The amount of people who would like somewhere to run functions and not care at all about infrastructure is growing rapidly. If they're not skating to where the puck is moving…

Hmm...you can fairly easily (haha) layer functions/serverless over K8s, e.g. with projects like OpenFaas.

Sure but why manage your own OpenFaaS when you're already paying a cloud provider and the billing will still be 24x7?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#223

Post by cbsmith »

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.

Wait... what? Sun didn't move into distributed systems? The "dot in dotcom" ignored the Internet? What are you smoking?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#224

Post by cbsmith »

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…

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about. JavaSpaces was a distributed key-value store. JXTA was all about a resilient distributed mesh. I hate on NFS all the time, but WebNFS demonstrated a much better understanding of how to do reliable data delivery over the Internet than HTTP ever did. Heck, even the old stuff around NIS+/ONC or NeWS or USENET covers distributed systems pretty well.

If you compare Sun to their competitors at the time: IBM, DEC, SGI, HP, and even Microsoft. Sun was way ahead on distributed systems.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#225

Post by zzzcpan »

cbsmith wrote: post #223
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.

Wait... what? Sun didn't move into distributed systems? The "dot in dotcom" ignored the Internet? What are you smoking?

There is more, they couldn't even survive the age of the internet and distributed computing.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#226

Post by cbsmith »

zzzcpan wrote: post #225
cbsmith wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait... what? Sun didn't move into distributed systems? The "dot in dotcom" ignored the Internet? What are you smoking?

There is more, they couldn't even survive the age of the internet and distributed computing.

I think it is very safe to say their failures had little to do with not appreciating the Internet or not understanding distributed computing. You might note that a LOT of companies that didn't survive that era actually understood both very well, and yet failed nonetheless. In a lot of cases you can point to startups these days that essentially retrieved those ideas from that era and reintroduced them to a world that had caught up with where they were at.

Sun moved in to this stuff. They understood it. They just weren't successful at figuring out how to run a business with it.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#227

Post by csirac2 »

cbsmith wrote: post #226
zzzcpan wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more, they couldn't even survive the age of the internet and distributed computing.

I think it is very safe to say their failures had little to do with not appreciating the Internet or not understanding distributed computing. You might note that a LOT of companies that didn't survive that era actually understood both very well, and yet failed nonetheless. In a lot of cases you can point to startups these days that essentially retrieved those ideas from that era and reintroduced them to a world that…

Technologists certainly tend to seek solutions, and find blame in technology or the application of it. Getting technology right is necessary, but not sufficient.

In the end, the world is much bigger than the tech we build & consume.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#228

Post by RantyDave »

Annatar wrote: post #187
RantyDave wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joyent's value proposition was killed (for the most part) by the experience of using their public interface. It would've taken a great deal of bravery to try that and decide a local install would be better. The node thing also did a lot of damage - Joyent wrote a lot of the SmartOS/Triton command line tools in node so they were slow as hell. Triton itself is a very non-trivial install although quite probably less so…

"For a start it needs to do its first boot off a CD and subsequent boots off a USB drive-type-arrangement." No it does not. I boot my SmartOS instances with PXE, DHCP and TFTP from the network. Served by a Solaris 10 intel server, no less. No CD's or USB images anywhere in sight. In fact, I came up with a trifecta scheme where three SmartOS servers will all run TFTP and DHCP servers, thus being able to boot each othe…

So not on AWS, then? Hence "on the cloud", I never said it was impossible in your garage.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#229

Post by cyphar »

Annatar wrote: post #179
alynn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never in my life dealt with engineers so competent, professional and kind as the Sun Microsystems folks were. If they were technologically arrogant, they earned it: their inventions outlasted the company and live on in many products. I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at hp , SGI and Sun Microsystems did. They might h…

While I definitely agree that Sun, HP, and SGI had amazing engineering this section of your comment is particularly ridiculous:

> I cannot name a single GNU/Linux "hacker" inventing anything. Everything they implemented is a shoddy copy of what the engineers at [...] did.

If we ignore the obvious counter-arguments (GCC, Apache, nginx, arguably git, and so on), and just look at your statement at face value -- you're saying that nobody from the largest free software community in the world has invented anything new in the past 10-15 years. What possible evidence do you have that this is true? It's not just wrong, it's offensively so.

Heck, ZFS-on-Linux is now the repo-of-record for ZFS -- that's a specific example of the GNU/Linux community implementing things alongside the rest of the free software community (and currently ZoL has more features than any other ZFS port).

It's also the case that those brilliant engineers did the same thing. Zones are arguably a re-implementation of Jails with some slightly different design goals. IOCP is objectively just a copy of kqueue (to the point where Cantrill said he wished they'd just ported kqueue). And so on. I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but it's quite strange to put them up on a pedestal to the point where you effectively say that any engineer who didn't work at Sun/HP/SGI in 2003 hasn't invented anything.

There are obviously plenty of examples of Linux not learning from others (Jails/Zones vs containers, kqueue/IOCP vs epoll, DTrace vs eBPF+bpftrace, and so on). But arguing that nothing innovative has come out of the GNU/Linux community ever is just awful.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#230

Post by Annatar »

jen20 wrote: post #210
Annatar wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There used to be but I cannot find it any more, that is exactly why I asked...
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