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Joyent Public Cloud EOL

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Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#171

Post by minusf »

Chyzwar wrote: post #124
cookiecaper wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for a very long time the Linux devs were emphatic that cgroups should be not be treated as an actual isolation/security barrier. This was flagrantly ignored and like most things in the Linux ecosystem, the functionality was eventually kinda-sorta backfilled based on the community's refusal to accept anything else. Meanwhile, FreeBSD and Solaris had quietly provided coherent tools to accomplish the same ends secu…

I disagree. Linux have 18 millions lines of code in drivers. It can run on almost any chip/architecture. Distributions are fully featured and most of the things you can imagine have first class support. I do not care how beautiful is architecture of BSD kernel if I cannot run my code on it.

does Linux run on a toaster? ;)

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#172

Post by merb »

jen20 wrote: post #136
merb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

maybe you should use gcloud gke. or even digitalocean, they provision in under then minutes aswell. not sure why aws and azure take so long.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#173

Post by nixgeek »

user5994461 wrote: post #76
Annatar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't explain anything really. What I want to know is what actually went on behind closed doors. Everything else is corporate public relations. In these cases hearsay is often far more accurate and reliable than these carefully worded statements. The statement implies that Samsung's hunger for resources had grown so large that there is no more room for the public hosting side of the business, but considering h…

Let me give you some hearsay then from working in both megacorps and hosting. Running a public cloud requires a massive amount of people, unlike what you seem to think. It takes one or two orders of magnitude more work to do anything public rather than internal. Bet there is no resource and no budget to keep running their public cloud anymore. It's a small company, don't have unlimited resources. Second, there are no…

Amount of servers? Not sure. Reasonable speculation suggests us-east-1 to be over one million physical servers at this point, based on Hamilton’s talk about AZ design and scale at re:Invent a couple years ago and their IPv4 consumption rate across AWS.

I don’t imagine your average Fortune 50 has millions of servers.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#174

Post by [deleted] »

alynn wrote: post #152
cyphar wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has said he regrets it in a Reddit AMA[1]. I find it quite strange that you attribute the death of an entire company to the attitude of a single engineer in an email from 1996 where he made a silly remark. You'd think if Cantrill was that powerful of a king-maker you'd want to be much nicer to him. Not to mention that Cantrill himself is also clearly a nerd, so "nerd-hating" is a bit of a weird statement. [1]: htt…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#175

Post by dragonwriter »

cookiecaper wrote: post #110
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…

Yes, for a very long time the Linux devs were emphatic that cgroups should be not be treated as an actual isolation/security barrier. This was flagrantly ignored and like most things in the Linux ecosystem, the functionality was eventually kinda-sorta backfilled based on the community's refusal to accept anything else. Meanwhile, FreeBSD and Solaris had quietly provided coherent tools to accomplish the same ends secu…

> People utilize technology products as fashion statements first and foremost,

It's true that tech has a popularity-breeds-popularity effect, but I don't think it's mainly fashion (at least, for industrial use of tech like PLs used commercially), but network effects around available knowledge and skilled users.

Abstract technical superiority often isn't a commercial win without reliable availability of people able to use it effectively at costs that make it efficient. There's situations where buying the limited knowledge pool, or paying to grow on house skill, is worthwhile, but often the “worse” solution that is well-known is better practically

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#176

Post by glandium »

kelp wrote: post #156
bcantrill wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha ha -- wow! I had no idea that I possessed such power over time and space! As has already been pointed out to you (and has been pointed out repeatedly on HN over the years), I do regret the remark. So, there's that. I would also note that the rise of Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s corresponds with the performance of x86 surpassing the performance of the RISC microprocessors during that same period -- a tim…

I think you're right regarding x86 performance being a huge factor. Also my own experience, admining a number of Solaris systems in those days, I just found it more frustrating to use. The first thing I would do was put GNU userland on there to make a Solaris system more usable. Later on when I had more say in what systems things ran on, I'd reach for Linux because it was easier. It was good enough. I could easily ru…

When you could run Solaris on the same hardware (x86), it was noticeably slower than Linux.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#177

Post by Annatar »

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…

"but it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end"

It's not a dead end since any company, public or private can use the code and the product (I for instance build my own modified SmartOS from source) to power their infrastructure.

Technically there is nothing to prevent anyone from taking the product and the code and starting the next Amazon. I know of at least one internet service provider in the UK who is leveraging SmartOS to provide commercial, for-profit service. There are probably more such businesses, but this is something which squarely falls under "I'm keeping my mouth shut and making money" category.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#178

Post by Annatar »

kragen wrote: post #135
pron wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is patent nonsense. Sun lost because they were not price competitive. They thought they could command outrageous sums and 46% profit margins because they sold UltraSPARC-based servers and in the case of AMD / intel servers because they bore the Sun Microsystems logo. Meanwhile Linux ran on shitty personal computer hardware and was just good enough for enough kids who didn't have a clue about correctness of operation or reliability and still to this day don't, as is often evident from many, many comments on the subject of GNU/Linux here.

Sun Microsystems stubbornly refused to lower prices to undercut the generic shitty personal computer used as a server and that cost them the company. hp and IBM made the same mistake at expense of PA-RISC / HP-UX and POWER / AIX respectively. Oracle corporation is in the process of repeating that mistake. They all thought they could get away with outrageous profit margins and pricing. It's like once they started shipping servers to enterprises they all lost compass. Meanwhile, the whole market commoditized. They all wouldn't accept that. Now they've been reduced to rubble. hp "Enterprise" is missing in action somewhere peddling a server here and there, IBM started whoring itself around as a "re-invented" service company (the next "Computer Associates"?) and other than Exadata I don't know of a single business willingly buying Oracle servers. Yeah, it's very hard to predict how that will end. "Very hard".

At any rate, all of that has nothing to do with Bryan. Zero.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#179

Post by Annatar »

alynn wrote: post #152
cyphar wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has said he regrets it in a Reddit AMA[1]. I find it quite strange that you attribute the death of an entire company to the attitude of a single engineer in an email from 1996 where he made a silly remark. You'd think if Cantrill was that powerful of a king-maker you'd want to be much nicer to him. Not to mention that Cantrill himself is also clearly a nerd, so "nerd-hating" is a bit of a weird statement. [1]: htt…

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 have shoddily implemented it by writing the code from scratch, but they blatantly stole everything. For instance, the manual page for chkconfig(8) will even tell one that the command comes from SGI's IRIX.

Re: Joyent Public Cloud EOL

#180

Post by Annatar »

glandium wrote: post #176
kelp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right regarding x86 performance being a huge factor. Also my own experience, admining a number of Solaris systems in those days, I just found it more frustrating to use. The first thing I would do was put GNU userland on there to make a Solaris system more usable. Later on when I had more say in what systems things ran on, I'd reach for Linux because it was easier. It was good enough. I could easily ru…

When you could run Solaris on the same hardware (x86), it was noticeably slower than Linux.

That was over 15 years ago!

It's now faster than GNU/Linux on the same hardware and has been for the past ten years.

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