If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down • Hacker News Board

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#41

Post by kami8845 » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:12 AM UTC

smcl wrote: post #22

comice wrote: post #7

If this is gloating about the EC2 outage, then ugh. I can't find out if it is because the whole of joyent.com is actually down for me (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)

Yep, same for me. Delicious irony in my opinion

If a company is actually stupid enough to say "If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down" then I immediately lose all interest in working with that company. Childish and they obviously have no appreciation for how hard it is to properly run a hosting company.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#42

Post by astrodust » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:13 AM UTC

TamDenholm wrote: post #3

im3w1l wrote: post #2

"Unable to connect" well that was rather ironic..

One of those things that is hilarious but not actually funny.

Ha, ha, only serious.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#43

Post by wisty » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:15 AM UTC

codemac wrote: post #37

wisty wrote: post #16

With a one-line pitch like "HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL-TIME WEB AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS", what could possibly go wrong? No, I don't hate Joyent. I can't even figure out what they offer. And I don't see "Python" or "Postgres" or "Redis" in their tech stack page, so what would reddit (a Python / Postres / Redis site) want with them? They seem to be mostly node.js / Mongo, which is a nice tech stack…

Joyent is some former Sun guys who are still committed to "the OS is a differentiator". They use Illumos, their fork of OpenSolaris... I'm pretty sure python, postgres, and redis all run on Solaris, but Joyent's value add is NOT at the application layer, but in OS features that facilitate application workloads better. Their SmartMachines (or zones), ZFS, dtrace.. Solaris is an epic environment to develop in. I probab…

OK, so they use "zones" (beefed up multi-user, which should have less overhead than virtualization) and a fork of OpenSolaris (interesting features, reputed to be very stable).

I wish they'd just say that, as it makes their "Faster than VM" claim seem a lot less wild.

Shared hosting is actually more efficient than VMs, but it got a bad rap due to massively oversold hosts.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#44

Post by xentronium » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:16 AM UTC

anonymouz wrote: post #25

With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up. [1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the…

Red herring.

Besides, as far as I understand, Textdrive is in the process of being relaunched, honoring all the lifetime plans.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#45

Post by lolwutreddit » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:19 AM UTC

There is no way they can achieve that uptime claim, nor should they try to say they have 99.9999% aka "six nines". That's 31.5 seconds a year, and even a well-designed network is going to have that much at some level. I mean, the VPSes might be distributed across hardware, but a failure of some component might mean that it's still "up", but seriously degraded during the transition. How useful is that for "uptime"? It becomes a bragging right. How about if all routes to a large provider, like Level(3) are down for a reset period, or are re-routed through Cogent, which is maxed out on all peering with L3 at 99% packet loss levels? Is that really uptime? Sure, that's out of their control, but the situation with their own website being down for some people right now underscores that lofty claims are meant to be broken.

Now that they're beating that Joyent drum a little more: watch them fall down under a DoS attack that Amazon could bat away at this point. I'm by no means supporting Amazon, but Joyent is still a small company with big claims. I predict they will fall apart when Sun stops making hardware, and when their engineers argue over whatever trendy "wrong way to do it" Node-type technologies that they're jacking off over next.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#46

Post by lolwutreddit » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:21 AM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #17

tzaman wrote: post #4

They should send this open letter to Heroku as well :)

Historically, running Ruby on Joyent was an exercise in frustration. Heroku isn't only Ruby these days, but operating as a stable ruby platform is still a requirement I think. Among other things: Solaris threading libs with crashy bugs when you pop a new thread open. Took quite a while to figure that one out.

It's annoying that the two people that try to tell me that "Rails doesn't scale" are also Joyent customers. I tell them, "no, you can't scale Rails".

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#47

Post by Maxious » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:23 AM UTC

Tim-Boss wrote: post #32

comice wrote: post #7

If this is gloating about the EC2 outage, then ugh. I can't find out if it is because the whole of joyent.com is actually down for me (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)

Apparently they're having some SSL issues, try disabling "https everywhere" or any other similar browser addons I presume you're running!

> curl http://joyent.com/

  curl: (7) couldn't connect to host

Doesn't look like an SSL issue...

  Tracing the route to joyent.com (165.225.132.33)

[...]

  8  *  *  *

  9 65.125.14.38 [AS 209] 312 msec 316 msec 308 msec

  10

  command timed-out

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#48

Post by dchest » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:23 AM UTC

Hansi wrote: post #13

Ironically the site's SSL is not configured correctly... Doesn't work when using the "HTTPS Everywhere" extension unless you manually change it to not opt for HTTPS on the site.

Huh? There's no SSL on joyent.com. Their login form, however, has it, on a different domain: https://my.joyentcloud.com.

Not sure how this can be classified as "not configured correctly". It's HTTPS Everywhere who's incorrect there.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#49

Post by mcherm » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:26 AM UTC

brador wrote: post #34

anonymouz wrote: post #25

With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up. [1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the…

Why not sue them?

Because that is a very poor solution to most problems in the world.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#50

Post by JoachimSchipper » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 10:27 AM UTC

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #40

anonymouz wrote: post #25

With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up. [1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the…

"lifetime" "unlimited" "forever" etc products should always been looked at sceptically for that reason. Anything that is either finite or requires up-keep cannot be offered on these terms, it is just impossible. I actually avoid unlimited products on purpose because I think a lie is a bad way to start doing business together. Be it web-hosting, broadband, or anything else. I would prefer they just be up front and the…

If the upkeep is smaller than the cost of capital to the company, such an arrangement probably remains mutually beneficial. Given that the cost of computing resources was falling enormously and continues doing so, I can see why TextDrive expected this arrangement to be profitable for them. Note that pensions and annuities, arrangements with terms best described as "pay $X/month for as long as I live", exist.

(Of course, they pivoted out of the hosting business and found that supporting a one-off machine is an expensive headache. But it's not impossible for such an arrangement to work.)