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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#111

Post by kbenson »

rjzzleep wrote: post #105
kbenson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a IllumOS/SmartOS user, but can you comment on how good the man pages are? What you state is sometimes a complaint I hear about OpenBSD, but from my experience using OpenBSD (which was mostly almost a decade ago now) is that's because they actually put a huge amount of effort into making sure the man pages were not just correct, but comprehensive (to the point of requiring code patches to include an accompanying…

These are so different use cases. Good luck trying to find out how to do your network design with the dladm and good luck trying to understand the capabilities and limitations of etherstub from the manpages. But yeah the structure of the OpenBSD man pages looks ok. Where you put proper structured documentation doesn't really matter IMHO. It's conceptually different. You can easily use the OpenBSD manpages, because th…

Honestly, looking at the dladm man page makes it look pretty good to my eyes. It's technical, and long, but the fact that it seems to go into the capabilities in great detail and how to use it as well as includes twenty separate examples at the bottom is something I see as a good sign. This is exactly the kind of reference, that included with a couple test systems to play with, I could use to figure out how to implement a network design.

Whether it accurately explains the capabilities of etherstub I don't know, but it seems to do a good job explaining what it is and is used for. The basic usage is detailed within one of the examples. I'm not sure what you're comparing it to that you think would be a superior way to document it though. I honestly can't imagine it being better in Linux in any way. Windows, it would probably be explained better, but you might have to pay a few hundred dollars for the documentation or training, whether it be from Microsoft or a third party.

> It's conceptually different. You can easily use the OpenBSD man pages, because they map nicely to every other Unix system concept.

Not any more than SmartOS, I'm sure. IIRC, CARP is an OpenBSD designed protocol to compete with Cisco's proprietary VRRP. pfsync is their tool and protocol to sync PF (their own custom firewall implementation) states across a network link. sasync is their own protocol and implementation to sync IPSEC security associations across the network. These were eventually adopted and ported to FreeBSD, but they are far from "every other Unix system concept".

I view OpenBSD and IllumOS/SmartOS to be even more similar in approach now than I did prior to this discussion.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#112

Post by imperialdrive »

joeblubaugh wrote: post #6

Wow, 5 months is an insanely short timetable to ask people to migrate entire systems to another vendor. I’m surprised their contracts don’t have better terms.

If anyone reading this has less than 100 servers running with them, I am capable to handle turnkey documented migration in <60 days to a provider of your choice.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#113

Post by kbenson »

SwellJoe wrote: post #106
kbenson wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built). I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't s…

That's basically putting technology out to pasture. When you've got a handful of large corporate customers that depend on a product, you can continue to extract money out of them for years or decades without the product having a future.

The question is whether they are still actively pursuing enterprise clients. If they aren't, then I agree. If they are, then it's not putting it out to pasture, it's just a different business model. There are plenty of companies that do this. My brother works for one that does it for large network storage deployments using proprietary technology, and I imagine they don't want to hear from you unless you are willing to put out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on a deployment (and yet they still have new deployments). I definitely wouldn't consider them putting the technology out to pasture because of that.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#114

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Annatar wrote: post #46
cookiecaper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being…

It's far, far from over as long as SmartOS remains easier to use and more reliable than GNU/Linux. The source code is there to fork, so just like GNU/Linux, there will be people working on it and using it. OpenBSD has 5.71 developers and yet they're kicking ass churning out security features and innovations like there's no tomorrow. I secured my copies of the illumos and SmartOS gates. Joyent is proof that large scal…

I'm sure SmartOS is very reliable once you get it up and running, but "easier to use" than Linux is one of the most "[citation needed]" comments I've seen on HN in a while. Perhaps for folks who've had long familiarity with Solaris, it's easy-peasy, but I never found an OpenSolaris distribution/derivative that was remotely friendly to Solaris newbies.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#115

Post by warp_factor »

Sad day. I never used them but I always enjoyed Bryan Cantrill's postmortems and deep dives on Joyent all over the internet. Would love to see his take on this EOL announcement.

Bryan, are you around?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#116

Post by RantyDave »

jaytaylor wrote: post #79
throw0101a wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation

In this case, do clouds with physical bare-metal provisioning capabilities like EC2 / GCP / Azure / OCI kill the Joyent value proposition?

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 than a complete k8s rig.

There are also some really subtle Linux compatibility problems. For instance: IIRC a SmartOS malloc will not fail. Ever. But it might not return either. There's a really complicated mark/sweep type virtual memory thing and the documentation is good, for the nasty node stuff, and kinda terrible otherwise.

Finally, and with no lack of irony, you just can't run SmartOS on the cloud. For a start it needs to do its first boot off a CD and subsequent boots off a USB drive-type-arrangement. The hard part is that most cloud providers run a butchered Linux kernel and not a fully generalised VM - and on vultr at least, while they run a proper VM, for some reason the processors don't "come up".

I've not looked at all this stuff for at least a year so it may have changed. Either which way I believe the majority of the community is now on OmniOS - which I always got on better with anyway.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#117

Post by erichocean »

httpsterio wrote: post #73
randylahey wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ryan Dahl created Node.js prior to being hired at Joyent, and then sold them the rights to it.

The iojs debacle was because joyent had too much governance of the project and it was subsequently handed over to the board that currently governs nodejs. While the first Iines of what became nodejs weren't written by joyent, they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally.

> they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally

This is false, as someone who was actually there can attest. Node.js couldn't even run on Solaris when Joyent finally got involved, and Node.js technically and in terms of growth had already taken off thanks to Ryan Dahl.

Source: I'm the guy that ported Node.js to Solaris, and I have nothing to do with Joyent, then or now.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#118

Post by floatboth »

derefr wrote: post #74
cookiecaper wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and com…

There’s a gap in perspectives here, I think, which is roughly similar to that between Minix and Linux. Software doesn’t always have to compromise to pragmatism, because there’s nothing requiring that software be developed to be used . Sometimes a reference implementation is intended to be just that, and nothing more—a reference , for other implementors of other systems to crib ideas from, especially as pertains to ho…

Also, software doesn't have to be developed to spread widely.

I'm sure they're fine with it being Their Own OS that's only actually used for the Samsung Internal Cloud Thingy, while the source is public for anyone to take so it won't disappear from history.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#119

Post by bcantrill »

warp_factor wrote: post #115

Sad day. I never used them but I always enjoyed Bryan Cantrill's postmortems and deep dives on Joyent all over the internet. Would love to see his take on this EOL announcement. Bryan, are you around?

In terms of my take, much of it is in the blog entry: it was a difficult decision, especially because the public cloud is a big part of who we are. It's very important to us to do right by our customers, and the team has been very dedicated to doing everything we can to get affected customers onto new infrastructure. Beyond the EOL of the JPC, we continue to serve our on-prem customers -- and (to answer a question that came up elsewhere) our technologies are and remain entirely open source.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#120

Post by jeffrallen »

bcantrill wrote: post #59
cookiecaper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being…

While I appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my future endeavors, know that you will likely be disappointed: the beauty of open source is that it endures on the strength of its ideas alone -- and telling a group of people to stop working on a technology simply because you find alternatives scary is unlikely to be convincing. One of the most important lessons I have drawn from the many open source communities that…

+1 for thoughts and prayers!
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