Joyent Public Cloud EOL • Hacker News Board

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#231

Post by Annatar » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

RantyDave wrote: post #228

Annatar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

AWS? I'm not a loser, I design my own 19" rack mountable servers, modify and compile my own version of SmartOS, do you really think I'd be so dumb and naive as to entrust my business to some corporation? HELL NO!!! How could you even think that, what would give you such a preposterous idea!?!

And it gives me immense pleasure to be able to state that not even Digital Ocean can beat my running and maintenance costs, especially long term.

All these "cloud" providers are for people who aren't capable of designing and running their own data centers cost effectively, either because they are too lazy (I condemn them for that), or because they have clueless management (time to change companies), or because they couldn't figure out how to be full stack system engineers, from hardware through system administration all the way to architecture (for which I again mercilessly and with prejudice condemn them).

If in that business one cannot do it quickly and cost effectively on-premise... one is the wrong person for the job. Truth be told, there are few of us left alive now who can, but that's all the more reason to master the old arts.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#232

Post by Annatar » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 6:47 AM 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…

You seem to believe a shitty general key-value store with no SQL interface and no ACID guarantees qualifies as a distributed system, which is terribly shallow and misguided.

I worked at a company circa 2005 where we had a platform as a service built on top of Solaris 10 and zones, on-premise infrastructure which you now call cloud. Fully configured and serving Sun clusters would come into existence by merely DHCP booting from the OpenBoot PROM (Sun had to give us patches for the OBP for DHCP booting). I happen to know this, because I was one of the senior system engineers who helped architect it and then built it. We had it powering tens of thousands of servers. We were one of the first users of IP Multipathing in Solaris ("IPMP"), a technology Sun engineers invented to provide redundancy for network connectivity for the clusters. Amazon wasn't even a smear yet. That was in 2005. Which year is it now? How many years ago was that?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#233

Post by Annatar » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #224

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…

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…

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

Careful now, you're on thin ice: Sun Microsystems might have been a pioneer in distributed cloud computing, but nobody did it better than SGI: once they had the NUMALink technology from CRAY, they invented cluster routing in hardware which would linearly scale with added router modules. I had Origin 2000's hooked up and scaled them linearly thanks to NUMALink, the hardware routing bricks and the crossbar switch on the motherboard. And IRIX 6.5 was aware of it all and used it!

I'd hit the power button on one server and the other one would come up; after the systems booted, each having 8 GB of memory and 8 processors, I logged into a single IRIX instance with 16 GB of RAM and 16 processors. The only company to come even close to that was DEC, years prior, but nobody perfected it so throughly like SGI engineers. What CRAY started, SGI engineers finished. Sun only came with hardware which had the crossbar switch after SGI, and they never had their own hardware router bricks. By router I don't mean network router, I mean cluster scalability router which had nothing to do with TCP/IP networking.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#234

Post by Annatar » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 7:06 AM UTC

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.

Sun Microsystems literally invented geoclustering! Wow... just... wow.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#235

Post by SwellJoe » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 7:56 AM UTC

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…

Not a single one, huh? I'll help: https://git-scm.com/

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#236

Post by cyphar » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #235

Annatar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not a single one, huh? I'll help: https://git-scm.com/

There is a counter-argument to git -- namely Sun had TeamWare[1] (the prequel to BitKeeper) and thus you could argue that git is still a "shoddy reimplementation". But this of course ignores the fact that TeamWare was almost completely unknown outside Sun until BitKeeper came along (at which point it was just an element of BitKeeper's history), and that git is objectively superior in many metrics to TeamWare.

Personally I think GCC, Apache, and nginx are much better counter-arguments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_WorkShop_TeamWare

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#237

Post by Annatar » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 11:22 AM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #236

SwellJoe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single one, huh? I'll help: https://git-scm.com/

There is a counter-argument to git -- namely Sun had TeamWare[1] (the prequel to BitKeeper) and thus you could argue that git is still a "shoddy reimplementation". But this of course ignores the fact that TeamWare was almost completely unknown outside Sun until BitKeeper came along (at which point it was just an element of BitKeeper's history), and that git is objectively superior in many metrics to TeamWare. Persona…

Quite unfortunately for all of us condemned to use GNU/Linux:

- GCC exists because Sun Studio compilers weren't free back then;

- Apache is the next generation NCSA web server;

- nginex is a re-invented Apache wheel.

Do you have any more examples to get corrected on? I'll be glad to set you straight, in the hope that unlike your Linux buddies you are capable of learning.

They are simply amateurs wanting to play engineers, but they never were engineers and never will be, and it shows in just how shitty GNU/Linux based operating systems are. Hacked up together by hackers according to the "hack it 'till it works, man!" motto. And they don't learn from their mistakes or from the mistakes of others, on top of being deeply convicted that they are the best.

Find me one technology invented in GNU/Linux which UNIX did not already invent and I will publicly retract my statement here. Just one.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#238

Post by zzzcpan » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 12:02 PM UTC

Annatar wrote: post #234

zzzcpan wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sun Microsystems literally invented geoclustering! Wow... just... wow.

> Sun Microsystems literally invented geoclustering!

They didn't. Not that any of it is important anyway. All 80s and early 90s networking tech was ridiculously broken, which should be obvious, since distributed systems field was just born at that time (first papers in like 1978). Things started to get useful only by the end of nineties. But by that time Sun's tech was nowhere near anything internet companies were doing. So later when things got to infrastructure Sun's engineering was really really behind, they had to start from scratch on anything that internet companies were learning and doing for many years. And this was very different time consuming knowledge, not something where someone could use their OS level expertise. Which also makes it very hard to compete with companies that are much farther ahead, especially with this silly "our tech is the greatest" attitude making it hard to even realize how far behind you actually were.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#239

Post by moeffju » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #182

SwellJoe wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

We have an art installation at the corporate campus where I work. It's a parody of 1984, with inspirational quotes flowing over the entire building (300meters long). But they are not inspirational, rather artsy sometimes edgy and provocative. The sentences change every day, and are controlled by an artist in California somewhere. One of the sentences one day was: "Monomania creates success" I keep a logbook of the st…

Would you happen to be working in Germany?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#240

Post by rainymanyu » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 1:56 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…

Whatever... They are now history and lately remembered by hanging over Java to Oracle... Everything else will be buried in history or 42nd page of Google search results