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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#271

Post by Annatar »

notacoward wrote: post #260
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…

Wow, they invented the slogan. Sun alumni seem awfully thin-skinned about not getting credit for every little thing they did, which is why it's pretty unforgivable to deny DEC credit for anything more than "some work on hardware". I was working on DECnet-based remote file access software in 1989. It wasn't new, but NFSv2 was. DEC already had real clusters doing real work before Sun did. Within the company there was a…

I am not a Sun Microsystems alumni. I wish I was, just as I equally wish I were an SGI alumni.

Yes DEC did have clusters, and I remember booting my Alpha workstations from a Sun SPARCStation 20 over DECNet as an AutoClient and I know DEC had hardware clustering and VMS working together as a distributed system, but since I came at the end of that era and only worked with Ultrix and DECUnix, I don't know any more about it which is why I couldn't go into detail. I only go into detail when I know about something and usually I've done that something myself.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#272

Post by Annatar »

zzzcpan wrote: post #269
notacoward wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe ZFS represented a missed opportunity by spending all that effort on a local filesystem instead of trying to do something interesting in the distributed space. I even said so at the time, since I was working on distributed filesystems at the time, but that's just a strategic issue (and one that's quite arguable). It's not evidence of ignorance or lack of experience.

Well, on that part I was referring more specifically to the vdev mess and raidz, how you cannot just add a disk to the file system. Which is pretty silly, considering that at the time there were plenty of ideas how to do it much better, although not for disks, but for nodes in distributed systems. But apparently no one on ZFS team had any idea about any of it.

ZFS doesn't work that way: it works on pools of storage. Disks are added to the pool.

Filesystems (or datasets) are carved out of a pool, not out of physical disks directly. There are vdevs on top of physical disks.

That's like people who are stuck back in the '80's because of ext3 arguing that ZFS is crap because it doesn't come with fsck or "some sort of repair tool" -- they just can't wrap their head around the ZFS concepts.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#273

Post by Annatar »

zzzcpan wrote: post #268
Annatar wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not care who you are. Your comments on this thread made it crystal clear that you are not familiar with the subject matter: for you distributed has a very narrow meaning of a sharded key-value store, you've succeeded in making that clear. "Cloud", except that's not it. And whether you "flagged" my comment or not, that's irrelevant to me.

It doesn't have that meaning to me. But in the context of a failed cloud company of Sun refugees the only experience in distributed systems that matters is the experience Sun refugees didn't and couldn't have. For some reason you are claiming absolutely irrelevant things to any of that. And, of course, resorting to personal attacks.

Personal attacks? Did someone else make outrageous claims logged into your account, or was it you? Don't resort to that and take responsibility for yourself!

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#274

Post by Annatar »

notacoward wrote: post #270
zzzcpan wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, on that part I was referring more specifically to the vdev mess and raidz, how you cannot just add a disk to the file system. Which is pretty silly, considering that at the time there were plenty of ideas how to do it much better, although not for disks, but for nodes in distributed systems. But apparently no one on ZFS team had any idea about any of it.

That was a pretty common pattern at Sun. Engineers there did a lot of great work, no denying it. Like many other projects, ZFS solved some pretty difficult and important problems while ignoring others. Which ones get talked about ad nauseam? We all make mistakes, of course, but some of those ignored problems were well known at the time to be worth solving. Did those self-professed "complete engineers" learn anything…

The problem is they cannot all be solved with just one single thing. Jeff Bonwick and his team knew that. They knew what was left on the table and they had to make that call. A completely fault tolerant, distributed system which can correctly arbitrate a write to a single shared resource (usually a file or even a block) from multiple nodes at the exact same time is a problem which has not been solved correctly yet, to the best of my knowledge and belief. I myself have spent considerable amount of time (20 years, to be precise) trying to solve that particular problem correctly for all edge cases. That problem is terra incognita in computer science and yet to be throughly researched, let alone understood. All attempts at solving that particular problem 100% correctly have not been successful, by anyone, but if you know of someone, please do tell, I'd love to be corrected on this and start using such technology immediately.

The ZFS team was well aware of this and that's why they made the trade-offs they did. They picked a subset of problems and they solved them. Even in hindsight, to me at least, it's obvious why.

But to suggest that Sun Microsystems doesn't exist because the company's engineers picked only a subset of problems they knew they could solve is... either terribly ignorant or wilfully malicious, or both, since malice often stems from ignorance. Sun Microsystems lost because they were too expensive, more expensive than garbage intel personal computer servers and because Solaris wasn't open source code in 1993. It's that simple.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#275

Post by Annatar »

notacoward wrote: post #261
cbsmith wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the distributed computing that the OP was referring to. Explicit reference was made to WAN-style networking that makes the crossbar switch effectively seem like motherboard traces.

Explicit reference was also made to NFS, which has nothing to do with WAN-style networking. The local Sun mafia are trying really hard to claim credit for distributed computing at all scales, and there's nothing off-topic about addressing one part.

"Sun mafia"? That's really uncalled for. Why are you angry with those people? What did they do, in your view, that makes them deserve such an insult?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#276

Post by notacoward »

Annatar wrote: post #275
notacoward wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicit reference was also made to NFS, which has nothing to do with WAN-style networking. The local Sun mafia are trying really hard to claim credit for distributed computing at all scales, and there's nothing off-topic about addressing one part.

"Sun mafia"? That's really uncalled for. Why are you angry with those people? What did they do, in your view, that makes them deserve such an insult?

Many many things over the years, going all the way back to 1990 when I was at Encore dealing with all the dirty tricks they played to hobble competing NFS implementations, but that's not the point.

My real issue with them is hubris. There's a certain cadre of Sun alumni, highly visible on forums such as this, who would have us believe that they were absolutely always doing the best work on the most important problems. I think that denies credit to others who were doing work just as good on problems just as important, at companies which weren't driven into Oracle's arms by all the waste. Having known many of those people over the years - it's not for me to judge whether I'm one of them myself - I find that offensive. Sun just wasn't all that and the sooner we shed that particular piece of idol worship the better the industry will be.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#277

Post by Annatar »

notacoward wrote: post #276
Annatar wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sun mafia"? That's really uncalled for. Why are you angry with those people? What did they do, in your view, that makes them deserve such an insult?

Many many things over the years, going all the way back to 1990 when I was at Encore dealing with all the dirty tricks they played to hobble competing NFS implementations, but that's not the point. My real issue with them is hubris . There's a certain cadre of Sun alumni, highly visible on forums such as this, who would have us believe that they were absolutely always doing the best work on the most important problem…

You know why Sun engineers are all that? They made all these technologies they invented wildly popular in professional, elite IT circles. There are still many people who have no clue who Bryan Cantrill or Jeff Bonwick or Matt Ahrens or Nicholas Droux are because they're not in that elite or enthusiast circle of IT professionals dealing with those technologies, but for us who understand what they do and their importance to the overall computer industry, yes, we appreciate them for inventing them. Those people came forward, blogged and documented their work over the span of ten years, did you? I didn't read anything from you until yesterday, and it's not for the lack of trying, let me assure you. They made videos, presented at conferences, a lot. So yes they're popular, as they should be and they get credited, as they should.

It's like watching an Amiga demo: one has to understand how hard it was to code the effect to appreciate it -- a normal person off of the street just sees some graphics and hears some music. Sun engineers not only did great things well, but they popularized them too because they wrote intimate diaries in the open about their work over the span of ten years. They raised an entire generation of IT professionals and taught them what it takes and what it means to be an engineer.

I wish I knew who the engineer(s) behind SGI inst(1M) is(were), but unfortunately I don't because they never put names and faces on their products.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#278

Post by dang »

zzzcpan wrote: post #268
Annatar wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not care who you are. Your comments on this thread made it crystal clear that you are not familiar with the subject matter: for you distributed has a very narrow meaning of a sharded key-value store, you've succeeded in making that clear. "Cloud", except that's not it. And whether you "flagged" my comment or not, that's irrelevant to me.

It doesn't have that meaning to me. But in the context of a failed cloud company of Sun refugees the only experience in distributed systems that matters is the experience Sun refugees didn't and couldn't have. For some reason you are claiming absolutely irrelevant things to any of that. And, of course, resorting to personal attacks.

Would you please not post personally abrasive comments or do flamewar on HN? Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#279

Post by dang »

Annatar wrote: post #273
zzzcpan wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have that meaning to me. But in the context of a failed cloud company of Sun refugees the only experience in distributed systems that matters is the experience Sun refugees didn't and couldn't have. For some reason you are claiming absolutely irrelevant things to any of that. And, of course, resorting to personal attacks.

Personal attacks? Did someone else make outrageous claims logged into your account, or was it you? Don't resort to that and take responsibility for yourself!

We've asked you repeatedly to stop posting like this to HN. If you keep posting flamey comments we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules strictly from now on?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#280

Post by nailer »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #32
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…

I won't neccisarily agree. There is space for "simple" hosting for some thing which is a bit more than just a (static/wordpreess) website, but not a large application, where cloud tooling setup is beneficial.

Sure but how much is that market growing?
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