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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

docs.joyent.com

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#131

Post by pron »

SwellJoe wrote: post #102
skrebbel wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node…

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon…

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison for the demise of Solaris, on which Cantrill had worked, but by the time Ellison acquired the failing Sun, Solaris, cool technology and all, had been pretty much dead or dying for a while -- at the hands of Linux, and not much helped by the Sun attitude. Cantrill was furious and blamed Ellison of being monomaniacal about making money ("don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison," he said) but perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market. Then again, luck plays such an important role in these things that nice narratives rarely give the whole picture.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#132

Post by merb »

jen20 wrote: post #125
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…

> Triton itself is a very non-trivial install Actually I'd say the Triton install is not only trivial, but should be a model for other similar systems. During my testing with Intel NUCs, I had a usable system deploying containers in under 20 minutes. Most managed Kubernetes systems cannot even provision in that time frame. > you just can't run SmartOS on the cloud. The installer may lead you to the USB and install pa…

> Most managed Kubernetes systems cannot even provision in that time frame.

when was the last time you used k8s?! I mean as of now there is even the expirmental k3os which boots a fully fledged k8s in seconds. you can even built a cluster with it. sadly HA backplane is still not available since k3s is still early in its development.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#133

Post by throw0101a »

tedunangst wrote: post #121
throw0101a wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been paying attention recently, but last time I checked, there were no known escapes out of Solaris zones, while there are quite a few CVEs about escaping Linux containers and even QEMU/KVM/Xen. The one escape out of FreeBSD jails that I'm aware of (CVE-2005-2218) involved not a bug in the jails code, but by burrowing out via devfs. So it seems that OS-level virtualization/security has a better track record…

Are you counting kernel exploits not directly related to jails/containers as an escape?

Generally, if someone was in a guest jail/container, there was no way of them being able to either (a) get to another guest jail/container or (b) getting to the parent context.

That was true at one point in time (i.e., no known breakouts). I don't know if that is still true, and if it is not, when that breakout CVE was published.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#134

Post by kenned3 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #102
skrebbel wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node…

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon…

This. Well put.

when eveyone was hooked on VM's and other nonsense they had 'branded zones' running.

The learning curve was high, but worth it once you had it running.

Sad to see them leave. wonder what i will do with my SmartOS based media server now?

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#135

Post by kragen »

pron wrote: post #131
SwellJoe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon…

I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison fo…

Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to "the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical support, Cantrill famously decided to respond by making fun of Miller for being a nerd: "Have you ever kissed a girl?"

https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-gi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet....

Admittedly, this was in 1996, and it's possible Cantrill regretted this remark, or the nerd-hating attitude behind it, at some point in the intervening 23 years. But I've never seen him admit it. I see he's participating in this thread, so if you see him not replying to this message, that's him doubling down.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#136

Post by jen20 »

merb wrote: post #132
jen20 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Triton itself is a very non-trivial install Actually I'd say the Triton install is not only trivial, but should be a model for other similar systems. During my testing with Intel NUCs, I had a usable system deploying containers in under 20 minutes. Most managed Kubernetes systems cannot even provision in that time frame. > you just can't run SmartOS on the cloud. The installer may lead you to the USB and install pa…

> Most managed Kubernetes systems cannot even provision in that time frame. when was the last time you used k8s?! I mean as of now there is even the expirmental k3os which boots a fully fledged k8s in seconds. you can even built a cluster with it. sadly HA backplane is still not available since k3s is still early in its development.

I'm talking here about the managed Kubernetes offerings from AWS and Azure. As for when I last used them: waiting for provisioning right now (18 mins and counting) is affording me the time to comment on this article.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#138

Post by aquaphile »

skrebbel wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node…

We were hosting customers of Joyent in 2006-2008. They were fantastic. I remember having a technical issue and talking directly to the CTO, who was most helpful.

Before AWS launched, Joyent (in my opinion) had one of the best hosting services. We ran everything on them, and especially liked Zones as a feature.

Separately, no one has mentioned that Joyent also had a full web application framework at one time (mail, calendar, etc.) that competed with the nascent Google GMail offerings. Joyent EOL'd back around 2010 if I recall correctly, but technically it was an impressive accomplishment.

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